Most group activities scratch the surface – people share names, roles, maybe a fun fact. But genuine group cohesion requires something deeper: an understanding of where each person has come from, what drives them today, and where they hope to go. The Tree of Life exercise does exactly that. Rooted in narrative therapy developed by Ncazelo Ncube-Mlilo and David Denborough at the Dulwich Centre, this structured reflection activity uses the visual metaphor of a tree to map a person’s past influences, present strengths, and future aspirations. When used in a group setting, it becomes a powerful catalyst for trust, empathy, and collective alignment.
Table of Contents
- What is the Tree of Life exercise?
- The anatomy of the tree
- Understanding personal and group growth through the tree
- Moving from past to present to future
- Fostering self-reflection and meaningful feedback
- Sharing trees as a trust-building practice
- Creating a forest: the collective dimension
- Connecting individual aspirations with group goals
- From individual motivation to collective alignment
- Sustaining the connection beyond the exercise
- How to run the Tree of Life exercise in a group
What is the Tree of Life exercise?
The Tree of Life is a strengths-based, narrative intervention in which each participant draws or illustrates a tree and labels its parts with personal meaning. Each section of the tree corresponds to a different dimension of the person’s life story. Rather than focusing on problems or deficits, the exercise deliberately draws attention to what people carry with them as resources – their history, values, relationships, and hopes.
Originally created to support children affected by HIV/AIDS in southern Africa, the Tree of Life has since been widely adapted for adults, professional teams, classrooms, and community settings around the world. Its genius lies in its simplicity: a single drawing can open up conversations that months of team meetings rarely produce.
The anatomy of the tree
Each part of the tree represents a specific area of reflection. The roots represent a person’s history, heritage, and the key influences that shaped who they are. The ground captures their current daily life – routines, roles, and present circumstances. The trunk holds their skills, values, and core principles. The branches point toward hopes and dreams for the future. The leaves name the significant, supportive people in their lives. The fruits represent legacies passed on to them – lessons, gifts, or attributes from people who matter. And the flowers and seeds represent the legacies they wish to leave behind for others.
An optional compost heap at the base allows participants to acknowledge experiences or labels they no longer want to be defined by – a powerful act of letting go, especially relevant in professional contexts where people may have carried unhelpful narratives about their capabilities or identity.
Understanding personal and group growth through the tree
One of the Tree of Life’s most underappreciated qualities is how it makes personal development visible. When participants fill in their roots, they’re not just listing biographical facts – they’re identifying the experiences and people that built their current worldview. This act of articulation is itself clarifying. Many people move through professional life without ever consciously connecting their present strengths to their formative experiences.
In a group context, this matters enormously. A professional adaptation of the Tree of Life, developed for use with NHS staff and other workplace teams, encourages participants to reflect on their relationship to their work – the values that drew them to it, the skills they’ve developed, and the contributions they make to colleagues. When teams do this together, patterns emerge. Shared values surface. Common experiences that hadn’t been discussed openly come to light.
The trunk of the tree is particularly generative for group work. When everyone articulates the skills and principles they bring to a shared environment, it becomes clear that the group is more resourced than any individual member may have realized. This shift – from “what I bring” to “what we have together” – is where personal growth and group growth converge.
Moving from past to present to future
The Tree of Life structures reflection across time. This isn’t accidental. The tree as a visual metaphor helps participants discover aspects of themselves shaped by the past and then actively consider the kind of person they want to become. In a group setting, this temporal span is what gives the exercise its emotional depth. People aren’t just describing who they are right now – they’re showing the arc of their development.
For teams navigating change, this is especially useful. Research published in the British Psychological Society’s journal describes the Tree of Life as a narrative therapy tool adapted for teams during organisational change – with results showing improvements in both mental well-being and team cohesiveness after sessions. When a group can see how each member has navigated difficulty, adapted, and grown, they develop a more realistic and resilient sense of what the team is capable of together.
Fostering self-reflection and meaningful feedback
Self-reflection is a precondition for meaningful participation in any group. Without it, people show up to discussions with fixed positions and limited self-awareness. The Tree of Life exercise creates a structured opportunity for reflection before sharing – which changes the quality of what gets expressed.
When each person works through their tree individually, they’re doing genuine introspective work: What shaped me? What do I actually value? Who matters to me and why? What do I want to contribute? These aren’t quick questions. The exercise creates space to sit with them, which means that when people do share, they’re sharing something considered and real rather than performative.
Sharing trees as a trust-building practice
The sharing phase of the Tree of Life is where group cohesion is actively built. Research on storytelling-based group interventions consistently shows that shared personal narratives reduce the sense of isolation – people recognize common experiences and develop empathy through hearing each other’s stories in an intentional setting.
The original Tree of Life methodology includes an “outsider witness” element: after someone shares their tree, others respond not with judgment or advice, but with specific observations about what resonated with them. This practice – noting which expressions stood out, what images came to mind, and how the story moved them – creates a form of validation that goes well beyond typical feedback in group settings. It tells the speaker: your story was heard, and it mattered.
For teams working together regularly, this kind of structured appreciation accelerates trust. Group coaching research identifies trust and psychological safety as foundational to high-performing teams. The Tree of Life builds both by making vulnerability structured and reciprocal – everyone participates, and the process is equitable.
Creating a forest: the collective dimension
Once individual trees are complete and shared, they can be displayed together to form what practitioners call a Forest of Life. The forest metaphor is deliberately collective – it’s about strengthening connections not just between individuals, but between each person and the wider group or organisation. A forest, after all, is more than the sum of its trees. Trees in a healthy forest share nutrients, support each other’s growth, and collectively weather storms that would topple any single tree.
This final stage of the exercise gives abstract ideas like “team support” and “collective resilience” a concrete, tangible form. Group members can literally see how their individual stories connect and overlap. They can identify who else in the group shares their values, who has navigated similar challenges, and whose hopes for the future align with their own.
Connecting individual aspirations with group goals
One of the persistent challenges in group dynamics – whether in a workplace, an entrepreneurial venture, or any collaborative environment – is that individual motivations often remain invisible. People work alongside each other without knowing what actually drives the person next to them. This creates friction, misalignment, and missed opportunities for synergy.
The branches of the Tree of Life address this directly. When participants name their hopes and dreams – for their careers, their communities, their personal lives – these aspirations enter the shared space of the group. They become data that the group can work with. The exercise helps participants identify all the different aspects of their identity, including future goals and support systems, making these normally private considerations available for collective reflection.
From individual motivation to collective alignment
When a team maps individual aspirations alongside each other, patterns of alignment often emerge that weren’t previously visible. Two colleagues may discover they share a deep commitment to the same professional value. A team member’s long-term goal may align perfectly with a direction the group has been considering. Someone’s stated dream may reveal an untapped skill that the group genuinely needs.
This alignment doesn’t happen automatically – it requires facilitated discussion after the sharing phase. But the Tree of Life creates the raw material for those conversations. Rather than discussing team goals in the abstract, groups can now connect those goals to the actual lived aspirations of the people in the room. This makes commitment to collective objectives feel personal rather than imposed.
The exercise also reframes the relationship between individual and group success. Because the Tree of Life is non-pathologizing and strengths-focused, it shifts the frame from competition to contribution. Each person’s unique background and aspirations are treated as assets to the group, not factors to be managed or standardized. In professional and entrepreneurial contexts where collaboration is essential, this reframe can meaningfully change how team members relate to each other’s differences.
Sustaining the connection beyond the exercise
The real value of the Tree of Life isn’t just in the session where it’s completed – it’s in what it makes possible afterward. Groups that have gone through the exercise have a richer shared vocabulary. They know more about what drives each person, what each person has overcome, and what each person hopes to build. This knowledge doesn’t disappear when the workshop ends. It shapes how people interpret each other’s behavior, communicate during disagreements, and support each other during difficult periods.
Adapted versions of the exercise for organisational settings – sometimes called the “Tree of Culture” – have been used specifically to surface shared values and create collective documents that represent a group’s identity and direction. These adaptations show just how flexible the core framework is: it can be scaled from individual reflection to whole-team or whole-organisation use without losing its essential function of connecting personal story to collective purpose.
How to run the Tree of Life exercise in a group
The exercise works best with groups of 8-10 people and requires approximately one to two hours, including drawing, individual reflection, and group sharing. Each participant needs a large sheet of paper and drawing materials. The facilitator guides participants through each section of the tree sequentially, allowing time for quiet reflection before moving on.
During the sharing phase, small groups of three to four work well to ensure everyone has enough time to speak and be heard without the session becoming exhausting. The facilitator’s role is to maintain a space that is non-judgmental and psychologically safe – narrative approaches to group work emphasize that the quality of listening shapes the quality of what people are willing to share. Participants should never be pressured to disclose more than they’re comfortable with.
The “storms of life” component – an optional phase where the group discusses collective challenges – is most effective when handled carefully. The focus should stay on how the group has collectively weathered difficulty, not on reopening individual wounds. Keeping this phase forward-looking, grounded in shared strengths, preserves the exercise’s empowering character.
After sharing, displaying the completed trees in a visible space – a wall, a board, a shared digital folder – reinforces the forest metaphor and gives the group an ongoing reference point for the values and aspirations they’ve made visible together.
What do you think? If the people in your team or group each drew their Tree of Life today, what do you think would surprise you most – the roots they came from, or the futures they’re reaching toward? And how might knowing those things change the way your group works together?
References
- https://dulwichcentre.com.au/the-tree-of-life/
- https://www.sprintproject.org/post/the-tree-of-life-a-therapeutic-strengths-based-activity
- https://www.sprintproject.org/interactive-tree-of-life
- https://maudsleylearning.com/courses/using-the-professional-tree-of-life-with-staff/
- https://nathanbweller.com/tree-life-simple-exercise-reclaiming-identity-direction-life-story/
- https://explore.bps.org.uk/content/bpscpf/1/315/22
- https://www.mentalhappy.com/blog/storytelling-in-mental-health-techniques-for-professionals
- https://coaching-hub.net/coaching-exercises-for-groups
- https://www.meaghanpeckhampsychotherapy.com/resources/narrative-therapy-tree-of-life-exercise
- https://dralanjacobson.com/tree-of-life-therapy/
- https://www.snaicc.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/02433.pdf
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2864083/
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