30 Counseling Activities to Better Help Your Clients

The practice of counseling is full of exercises, role-play, and metaphors.

By wielding the power of experiential learning and analogy through such activities, counselors can help their clients discover the keys to lasting happiness and wellbeing.

As a counselor, there’s no need to develop tools such as these in a bubble. Rather, you can draw on the collective imagination of the positive psychology community.

To this end, this post will outline 30 useful counseling activities touching on a range of themes, including perfectionism, grief, relationships, and more. We’ll also point you toward activities suitable for both children and adults to help your clients of all ages see greater benefit from your counseling.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free. These science-based exercises explore fundamental aspects of positive psychology, including strengths, values, and self-compassion, and will give you the tools to enhance the wellbeing of your clients, students, or employees.

6 Best Counseling Activities for Adults

While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to counseling, experienced counselors will begin to recognize common complaints and themes expressed by their clients. Once such a theme has been identified, the counselor may then invite their clients to investigate it further using experiential or reflective activities.

To illustrate, let’s look at three common themes that may arise in therapy and useful activities that correspond to each.

3 Activities for perfectionism

Perfectionism is having

“high standards of performance which are accompanied by tendencies for overly critical evaluations of one’s own behavior.”

Frost et al., 1990, p. 540

Rates of perfectionism are increasing, particularly among younger generations (Curran & Hill, 2019). This rise in perfectionism among young people is suspected to be due to the ease with which they can compare themselves to their peers using modern technologies and metrics, such as with social media and college GPA scores.

Considering these findings, counselors exploring themes of perfectionism with their clients may find value in the following activities:

• Perfectionism Diary
  Clients struggling with perfectionism may not immediately recognize the specific situations or thoughts that trigger their unrealistic standards. This worksheet offers a structured way to record and reflect on perfectionist thinking and behavior as it occurs.
• Catching Your Critic
  Too much negative self-talk, spurred by perfectionism, will often wear down our self-esteem (McKay & Fanning, 2016). This worksheet will train your clients in the vigilance required to “catch” critical thoughts by inviting them to write them down and systematically explore their effects on behavior.
• Goal Setting to Manage Perfectionism
  This worksheet invites clients to break down perfectionist challenges into manageable goals. By identifying specific problem areas and translating them into concrete, achievable tasks, clients can begin to shift their mindset—focusing on progress over flawlessness.

In addition, consider our article How to Overcome Perfectionism to help your clients deal with this life burden.

3 Best activities for coping with grief

While losing someone you care about is difficult under any circumstances, some people experience more significant challenges when grieving than others. The experience of emotional distress that does not pass following a loss is known as complicated grief.

Complicated grief occurs when we experience

“feelings of loss [that] are debilitating and don’t improve even after time passes.”

Mayo Clinic, 2021

The following are three activities that may help your clients steadily work through the grieving process and adjust to their new reality without their loved one:

• A Letter to a Loved One
  This worksheet offers clients a space to express unspoken words that linger after loss, whether through a self-guided letter or with the help of sentence prompts.
• Grief Sentence Completion Task
  This worksheet presents clients with a series of sentence completion tasks. The prompts encourage clients to access their feelings and thoughts in the present moment, facilitating further inquiry and self-investigation surrounding their grief.
• How I Can Reshape My Future
  This worksheet invites clients to imagine how they might live their life in a way that both brings them happiness and would put a smile on the face of their lost love one.

3 Activities for Couples & Marriage Counseling

Upheaval within an intimate relationship, such as infidelity, conflict, or divorce/separation, is one of the most commonly cited reasons people seek out relationship counseling (Australian Institute of Professional Counsellors, 2010).

No matter the specific challenges a relationship faces, the common threads of ineffective communication and weakened trust are often at their core.

With this in mind, here are three broadly applicable activities you can use to support your clients in relationship therapy:

• Marital Conflict Questionnaire
  This worksheet invites clients to note common conflicts in their relationship and the circumstances surrounding them as a means to explore and resolve them.
• From My Way – No, My Way to OUR Way
  This worksheet is a template clients can use to explore and renegotiate responsibilities and expectations in a relationship. This is achieved by asking questions such as, “What needs to be done to ‘clean’ a kitchen after dinner?” By documenting both partners’ views, a pair can then settle on a mutually agreed-upon approach to carrying out tasks.
• Mutual Relationship Vision
  This worksheet helps partners articulate both their individual relationship dreams and their shared ideals. First, each person reflects privately using “I” statements to describe their perfect relationship. Then, they co-create a unified vision using “We” statements.

3 Engaging Options for Working With Groups

While many counseling activities are designed to be completed by individuals or one-on-one with a therapist, others can be undertaken during group therapy.

Group counseling activities can serve many purposes depending on the aims of the group, such as decreasing stress, teaching interpersonal strategies, or improving self-image.

Here are three ideas to try in your next group therapy session:

• Silent Connections
  This group-based mindfulness exercise invites participants to engage silently, using only non-verbal cues—like eye contact, facial expression, and body language. By heightening awareness of subtle, unspoken signals, the activity encourages presence, openness, and deeper attunement.
• What I See in YOU
  This group exercise boosts self-esteem by giving group participants insight into the wonderful qualities their fellow group members perceive in them. Participants are then encouraged to repeat these statements back to themselves, treating themselves with the same warmth as their peers.
• Empathy Bingo
  This worksheet uses a bingo grid to help group clients practice differentiating between empathy and other responses they may have during dialog with others, including sympathizing, correcting, or one-upping.

3 Family Counseling Exercises

Family dynamics are complex, often shaped by longstanding patterns, unspoken expectations, and differing needs between members. When these dynamics become strained, family counseling can help restore connection.

Whether the focus is on communication, conflict resolution, or rebuilding trust, structured therapeutic activities can offer families a way to explore their challenges and move forward together.

Here are three practical tools to try in your next family counseling session:

• Seeing Family Conflict as a Problem to Solve
  This worksheet helps families reframe everyday tensions as shared problems to solve, rather than battles to win. Using a set of collaborative “no-fault zone” rules, family members track situations where tensions arise and reflect on their emotional impact.
• What is Working Within the Family?
  Amid family conflict, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s going well. This worksheet invites each family member to reflect on the positive behaviors they see in others, such as small, supportive actions that make family life better.
• Meeting Our Family’s Needs
  This worksheet helps both children and adults recognize the deeper needs behind moments of joy or frustration within the family. Through guided questions, each family member explores what was or wasn’t fulfilled in key emotional moments, then shares their insights to foster mutual understanding.

Counseling Activities for Kids, Teens & Students

Children and adolescents face unique emotional and developmental challenges, from managing big feelings to navigating friendships and school demands.

Counseling activities tailored to young people can help them build emotional awareness, develop healthy coping skills, and express themselves in age-appropriate ways.

3 Best activities for kids

According to Benedict and Mongoven (1997), experts on the topic of play therapy, the major themes that may surface when counseling children will center around one of three themes:

• Aggression/power
• Family/nurturance
• Safety/security

These themes, and the potential for a child to express challenges within them, tend to flow from the quality and strength of attachments children experienced or continue to experience with primary caregivers.

Cleverly designed counseling activities can help children resolve unhelpful tendencies rooted in attachment by encouraging them to reexamine and challenge their automatic thoughts.

Here are three activities that tap into Benedict and Mongoven’s (1997) three core themes.

• Bubbling Over
  This worksheet uses the metaphor of a boiling pot to help kids understand coping skills they can use to manage stress, anger, and anxiety.
• Drawing Your Fears
  This worksheet invites a child to label and draw a situation that is scaring them or causing them to worry. They are then asked to draw future possibilities that may flow from this scenario, helping to get their expectations on paper and facilitate discussion.
• Alternative Thoughts
  This worksheet helps children slow down and challenge unhelpful thoughts, especially in moments of anger. By guiding them through specific questions about real situations, it teaches how to separate facts from feelings and imagine more balanced interpretations.

3 Best activities for teens

Adolescence is a time of profound psychological, social, and emotional transformation.

According to Erikson’s (1968) theory of psychosocial development, the central task of this stage is the formation of identity—a process often marked by conflict, self-exploration, and heightened emotional sensitivity.

Common therapeutic themes that arise during this period include autonomy, peer acceptance, self-esteem, and future planning (Geldard et al., 2015). Therapeutic activities that meet teens where they are, emotionally and cognitively, can help them explore their values, regulate intense emotions, and make sense of their evolving identity.

Here are three counseling activities for teens that work through these core developmental themes.

• Powerful Change Questions
  Autonomy is central to shaping future goals. This worksheet puts that power squarely in the hands of the teen completing it. With a series of bold, open-ended questions, it encourages self-directed reflection on dreams, fears, values, and ambitions.
• Self-Esteem Checkup for Kids
  Suitable for teens, this self-assessment invites young people to reflect on how they view themselves across a range of domains related to self-esteem. By rating each statement and considering what might help them grow, teens gain a clearer picture of their current self-esteem and how they might strengthen it.
• Identifying Healthy and Unhealthy Friendships
  This worksheet helps teens evaluate the quality of their friendships using clear, age-relevant criteria. By reflecting on real relationships, they learn to spot patterns that support, or undermine, their wellbeing.

3 Best activities for students

School life brings unique pressures—academic performance, social comparison, and future uncertainty among them. These stressors can impact students’ mental health, motivation, and sense of self-worth (Fairlamb, 2022; Pedrelli et al., 2015).

Counseling activities aimed at students are most effective when they support emotional regulation, build resilience, and offer practical tools to manage everyday challenges both inside and outside the classroom.

Here are three effective interventions to support students in a school counseling context.

• I Love My Classmate
  This movement-based classroom game helps students build positive peer connections through kindness and shared interests. By completing prompts like “I love my classmate who…,” participants learn more about each other while practicing inclusion and empathy.
• Reflective Questions for Personal Academic Performance
  This worksheet invites students to reflect on their learning process, not just their outcomes. By choosing questions that resonate, they assess effort, strategies, and areas for growth, helping them become more active participants in their academic development.
• Identifying Your Stress Resources
  This worksheet helps individuals map out the internal and external supports they can draw on during high-stress periods, like exams or assignment deadlines. By identifying key people, institutions, and personal strengths, students can better understand how their support systems buffer stress and reinforce resilience.

3 Counseling Activity Ideas for Termination

Uncertainty and anxiety often surround the process of terminating counseling. For instance, both the therapist and client may question when it is appropriate to end therapy, who should decide, and how termination should occur (Knox et al., 2011).

To help, here are three resources and activities to help you guide the process:

• Creating Good Habits Evaluation
  This worksheet helps clients translate intentions into sustainable behaviors using James Clear’s (2018) habit formation framework. As a termination activity, it’s ideal for consolidating therapeutic gains into long-term lifestyle changes.
• Basic Needs Satisfaction in General Scale
  Grounded in Self-Determination Theory, this validated assessment measures the extent to which a client feels autonomous, competent, and connected to others. It can be especially useful when used at both the beginning and end of a counseling process as a meaningful indicator of therapeutic growth.
• Willingness, Goals, and Action Plan
  This worksheet guides your client through the process of setting a goal, developing an action plan to pursue it, and anticipating hurdles to goal achievement. This goal-setting process can set clients up to continue working toward therapeutic goals independently following the termination of counseling sessions.

How to Choose The Right Activity for Your Client

With all these different therapeutic exercises to choose from, you may be wondering which will be the best fit for your client.

To decide, you’ll first want to revisit the client’s therapeutic goals. Ask yourself why you began working together in the first place and what the client is hoping to gain from their sessions with you.

Next, consider where you are in the therapeutic process.

Are you in the early stages of therapy, still working to define the problem and clarify the direction of your work together? If so, consider using assessment tools and reflective diaries. These can help both you and your client identify patterns and draw clear boundaries around the issues that need attention.

If you’re in the middle phase—collaboratively exploring solutions—goal-setting activities and visualization exercises can be especially powerful. These tools help clients imagine a compelling future beyond their current challenges, building the motivation and momentum needed for change.

Finally, in the action stage, where your client is ready to put insights into practice, turn to experiential tools like roleplays, behavioral rehearsals, and habit-tracking templates. These activities support skill development and help embed new behaviors into daily life.

Other factors to consider when choosing appropriate activities are as follows.

• Client age and developmental stage
• Cognitive and emotional readiness
• Match to client personality and preferences
• Adaptability to the therapeutic setting (e.g., one-to-one, group, couple, family)

Counseling Resources From PositivePsychology.com

Here are just a few of the resources you’ll find around our site, touching on some of the themes we’ve explored so far, including grief, relationships, family, and the inner critic:

• My Grief Plan
  This simple worksheet helps clients plan in advance regarding resources they can draw on or strategies to self-soothe during periods of grief.
• Create a Connection Ritual
  This in-depth intervention invites a couple to create a sense of shared meaning and strengthen an existing emotional bond by deliberately and consistently devoting time each week to rituals of connection.
• Dispute Negative Thinking
  This activity helps clients gain some distance from their inner critic by inviting them to write common self-critical thoughts on cards and practice quickly disputing them.

If you’re looking for more science-based ways to help others enhance their wellbeing, this signature collection contains 17 validated positive psychology tools for practitioners. Use them to help others flourish and thrive.

A Take-Home Message

No matter the demographic you serve, there is no shortage of activities out there to support you in providing better care as a counselor.

Likewise, whether you’re looking for activities for clients to complete on their own, with you, or together with peers as part of a group session, there are many pre-developed materials you can adapt for the job.

We’ve only scratched the surface here in terms of tools, exercises, and worksheets you can use to provide better counseling and care. We invite you to dive into our blog and read more articles in which we share additional counseling activities.

If you find an activity particularly useful, let us know how you’ve used it in the comments—we’d love to hear from you.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free.