Grownups Need Play Too

When you search for information about play, you come up with a lot of information about the benefit of play for children. Children learn how to be adults through play, just like puppies learn how to be hunters through play. Play helps children learn, practice social interactions, and figure the world out.

One World Futbol

This video shows the power of playing with a ball. The confidence, strength, and joy that can come from physical and team play. But it’s still focused on youth.

What about adults? Do adults have all the confidence, strength, joy, community, and learning they will every need? (Ha!) Adults also need play to give them a myriad of results – friends, health, mental stimulation, practice with difficult situations, excitement, possibility, hope, and acceptance.

More and more, people are realizing the importance of play for the personal lives of adults:

A quick search on line for “importance of play for adults” includes: http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2012/11/15/the-importance-of-play-for-adults/, https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199907/the-power-play, http://firstthings.org/the-importance-of-play-for-adults/, https://www.verywell.com/stress-management-the-importance-of-fun-3144588

However, play and work are still thought of as opposites. Play is good to help people be less stressed, but the work place must be serious.  There are a few exceptions:

Play at work

Many dot-com companies have long recognized the link between productivity and a fun work environment. Some encourage play and creativity by offering art or yoga classes, throwing regular parties, providing games such as Foosball or ping pong, or encouraging recess-like breaks during the workday for employees to play and let off steam. These companies know that more play at work results in more productivity, higher job satisfaction, greater workplace morale, and a decrease in employees skipping work and staff turnover.

If you’re fortunate enough to work for such a company, embrace the culture; if your company lacks the play ethic, you can still inject your own sense of play into breaks and lunch hours. Keep a camera or sketch pad on hand and take creative breaks where you can. Joke with coworkers during coffee breaks, relieve stress at lunch by shooting hoops, playing cards, or completing word puzzles together. It can strengthen the bond you have with your coworkers as well as improve your job performance. For people with mundane jobs, maintaining a sense of play can make a real difference to the work day by helping to relieve boredom.

Using play to boost productivity and innovation

Success at work doesn’t depend on the amount of time you work; it depends upon the quality of your work. And the quality of your work is highly dependent on your well-being.

Taking the time to replenish yourself through play is one of the best things you can do for your career. When the project you’re working on hits a serious glitch, take some time out to play and have a few laughs. Taking a pause for play does a lot more than take your mind off the problem. When you play, you engage the creative side of your brain and silence your “inner editor,” that psychological barrier that censors your thoughts and ideas. This can often help you see the problem in a new light and think up fresh, creative solutions.

Playing at work:

1. keeps you functional when under stress
2. refreshes your mind and body
3. encourages teamwork
4. increases energy and prevents burnout
5. triggers creativity and innovation
6. helps you see problems in new ways

Tips for managers and employers

It’s tempting to think that the best way to cope with an ever-increasing workload is to have your employees work longer and harder. However, without some recreation time, it’s more likely the work will suffer and your workers become chronically overwhelmed and burned out. Encouraging play, on the other hand, creates a more lighthearted work atmosphere that in turn encourages employees to take more creative risks.

• Provide opportunities for social interaction among employees. Throw parties, put a basketball hoop in the parking lot, arrange a miniature golf tournament, stage an office treasure hunt.
• Encourage creative thinking or just lighten the mood of meetings by keeping tactile puzzles on the conference room table.
• Encourage workers to take regular breaks from their desks, and spend a few minutes engaged in a fun activity, such as a word or number game.

from:  http://www.helpguide.org/articles/emotional-health/benefits-of-play-for-adults.htm

 

Even here, however, play is something separate from work. What if play could be utilized as a part of work? Yes, I’m talking about LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®. How did you guess? LSP lets people play their way to serious results. One case study is described here:

Case Study

As you can see, play was an integral part of finding a serious solution.

So often I find I need to talk about the benefits of the work I do without mentioning play because I don’t want to scare people off. I can help your team work better together, communicate better, be more efficient, solve problems that need everyone’s brain working together – but I save my methodology til later. LSP can provide serious work results, and I don’t want it to be dismissed because toys are involved.

I find it interesting that I also end up feeling very serious when I talk about play. I just re-read my post, and I’m very earnest! I am also learning how to incorporate playfulness into serious work. How do you do it? I’d love to hear!

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Ode to Thanks

It is the day before Thanksgiving, and I wish to write about gratitude.

I am grateful for so many things: hot running water; a rainbow during my morning walk; rain in parched California. I am grateful for finding my people, even if I wasn’t born into their family. I am grateful that other people like to cook. I’m grateful for understanding and acceptance of other people’s inner workings, even mine, even my son’s. I’m grateful for persimmon trees standing leafless and full of fruit. I’m grateful for heat on a cold morning, and for coolness on a hot afternoon. I’m grateful for indoor plumbing. I’m grateful for play as a way to connect people. I’m grateful for people I can just be with, so I don’t always have to do. I’m grateful for people who encourage me to do things I might not do on my own.

Most of all – I’m grateful that the more I look for things I’m grateful for, the less I want to complain about my life. I have at times found connection and understanding through sharing complaints, and I’m so glad that the connection and understanding were there during those times. And – I’m glad that today I see more to be grateful for than I see to complain about. I see joy and love and hope where once it was all anxiety and loneliness and despair.

If your life is full of anxiety and loneliness and despair, if on this holiday of giving thanks and declaring gratitude you do not feel thankful or grateful, I’d like to offer hope. I have not always seen light. Many years were very dark. It is possible for things to get better. Please, when you reach the end of your rope, reach out for help. Let someone know. We are all in this life together, and there are plenty of people who will lend you a hand if they know you need it.

Thank you. Gracias. Merci. Todah. Sheh sheh.

You fill my heart.

Smart Hands

One of the reasons LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® works is that it lets us think with our hands.

What does that even mean? Well, when challenged to build an idea, you  might not know what to make. How can you portray courage? Or fear? Or maybe the problem is that you don’t even know what you want to say? What is the idea you want to have? If we allow our hands to start picking bricks, we can figure it out as we go.

Let me tell you a secret: I almost always believe it won’t work – just before it does work. I was trying to demonstrate for someone how this happens, so I started clicking some bricks together – and I felt I had to tell her I had no idea what I was doing, since I had no idea what I was doing! I felt a terrible panic that it wouldn’t work, she would see I’m a fake, and she wouldn’t hire me. But then, the miracle happened: I started talking about what I was building, and suddenly the meaning was clear. I was building a base for something to stand on, but the base wasn’t completely solid. There were places it could tip. It didn’t always, but there was my insecurity made visible, I was afraid I would tip over. She could watch it happen, the way random bricks suddenly became a story with meaning.

Some artists know they can trust their hands. Probably hair dressers and makeup artists too. People who doodle sometimes find meaning in their drawings. But those of us who work with computers don’t have that experience of letting something take shape between our hands, and develop meaning as it does. LEGO® bricks are a great place to try it out, since no one will get hurt in the process, and it’s sort of fun to see what happens. There’s something satisfying about clicking the bricks together, even when the meaning is slow to materialize. I encourage you to give it a try! (And tell me about it – I’d love to hear your experience!)

Fear and LEGO®

I do what I do to bring people together. I work with teams of people who don’t trust each other and don’t understand each other, to help them understand and trust. I am passionate about bringing people together because of my own early experiences with isolation and feeling like no one had my back. And all of my experiences have shown me that having a diverse population with diverse thinking will give stronger, more creative, and more cohesive decisions – even if it takes longer to get to those decisions.

Today I am very sad about the divisions in our country. I write this the day after the election. It is clear that there is a huge divide in our country, and that the people on both sides don’t trust each other. That in fact each side thinks the other side is deluded at best, and outright terrorists at worst. There is so much fear, hate, mistrust, anxiety, and outrage that there is very little room for love, compassion, hope, gratitude, or trust.

When I was volunteering as a community mediator in the early naughties (I got trained in 2001) I always had a moment when I couldn’t see how the two sides would ever come together. They were too angry. Too hurt. Too fearful. Time and again, what brought them together was acknowledgment of common ground. A chance to be heard. A chance to hear. A chance to talk about mistakes made without using that as an opportunity to punish or lose a lawsuit. Having that safe space where admitting error was not the same as admitting guilt. Safe space held by trained facilitators who could help the two sides see they were not so far apart on the things they really valued.

I think in the end the people in this country are not so far apart on the things they value. We all want to feel safe. We all want to have a job we don’t hate that will support us and our families. We all want life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We have very different ideas about how to get there – do guns make us safer, or less safe? – but in the end we want the same things. I hope that when the dust settles, when those who lost have licked their wounds and those who won have stopped gloating, we can find a way to see the places we have common ground. I will happily bring my LEGO® bricks to anyone who wants some help in bridging the gap between us – this is sacred work and we can’t let anyone keep us from it.

Visual Stories

What does a skeleton with a pink flag on its head in a treasure chest mean to you?

The person who built this was reflecting on the gifts that making friends with her own mortality could bring her. So many other stories are possible – uncovering the skeletons in one’s closet; or climbing out of the dungeon where others have gotten stuck; or facing the death of a loved one; or a transition of some sort, an ending and a beginning. In LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® we always let the builder do the interpreting, since everyone brings their own point of view to every story. Having a visual makes the person’s story easier to understand and easier to remember.

I’ve been challenged to think about my stories recently. My stories about myself have often had me in the role of victim, but there are so many other ways to tell the story.

If this model were my story, I could be burdened with too much to carry. Or I could be a martyr holding up the world for other people to live in. Or maybe I am holding up my piece of the world just as everyone else does – a little crooked, but not more than I can handle.

In a LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® workshop, we only ask questions of the  models, not about the people telling the story. So we can ask what significance there is to the minifigure being split in half to hold up the tower. We can’t ask if the person has a split personality disorder, or if they feel powerless, or if their head is really that hard. We can listen as the person explores why s/he built it that way – sometimes they know, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes it’s significant, sometimes it’s merely structural.

Our stories can make us miserable or happy. There is road work being done outside my house while I type this, and I have a choice between being irritated at the constant noise and difficulty getting in and out of the driveway, and being grateful that the gas lines are being upgraded to something safer so the whole neighborhood won’t go up in flames in the next earthquake. I can shake my fist at the men holding signs saying STOP and SLOW for keeping me from getting where I need to go, or I can be grateful they are keeping everyone safe while there are workers in the road.

Sometimes we don’t even realize there is another story available. I appreciate the visual aspect of story telling with LEGO® bricks because it helps us see more clearly what other stories are possible in the same situation. Sometimes just being asked about something we built can help us realize there is something we want to say about it, or that our opinion has changed about it. It can help us realize how much of our situation is our story about it.