The Wall

by | May 25, 2021 | Commentary, Resources

credit: https://unsplash.com/@hngstrmby Lisa Forbes

Let’s talk about the wall. Not the Pink Floyd album but the metaphorical wall that represents what stands between us and some type of change. I’m a mental health counselor so this topic could quickly get into talking about our shame and childhood traumas that hold us back and mandate our behavior to this day. Gulp. For the record, I do think those things should be a part of the exploration for each of us but I’ll spare you this time since you probably only came here to read about Pink Floyd.

So, I won’t go psychoanalytic on you but in order to do something new and break out of the status quo we have to figure out what stands in our way. That pesky wall of anti-change factors is to blame. Without identifying what makes up our “walls” and then working to overcome those factors, we likely won’t change. For example, you could really want to be a better friend but until you can figure out what gets in your way of actually being better, it will only be a half-assed aspiration and flimsy promises made to another person. Finding the barriers to the change is where the magic is…that’s just good ol’ advice for anything in life.

But since this is a blog on a website about play in higher education let’s start there. Lecture-based teaching seems to be this bad habit that’s been passed down from generation to generation of academics and we just keep doing it despite how boring and ineffective it is. I’m skeptical of any “tradition” or norm that’s been in existence for centuries and keeps being just “the way we’ve always done it.” Don’t even get me started on my disdain for traditions. 

Despite lecture-based teaching being the primary mode of education for so long, and even more recent literature indicating that lecture actually isn’t the most effective mode of teaching, many faculty are still slow to adopt a more active, engaged, or playful approach. It seems simple to me but I realize there are barriers that influence our way of existing in academia. I think there are some structural reasons for why it is the way it is in academia. It’s this way because it works for certain groups of people. In my heart I don’t think the traditional mode of teaching works for students but I think in a way it works for faculty. I don’t want to lump all faculty into one category or characteristic but I am talking broadly about academia being largely similar across institutions. 

So, let’s look at some of the bricks in the wall…

Safety and Comfort

It really is easier to continue to do what you know than to try new things and to potentially take a risk on something you are not certain about or may require you to give up some control. It may feel safer to continue to teach the way we do when students’ feedback on our teaching is considered in our promotion or merit review. Change is scary, especially when it’s trying something potentially out of your comfort zone. Not to mention, faculty work very hard on their lectures and lesson plans so who is happy about re-doing everything that you’ve worked so hard to construct. But we never learn or grow in our comfort zones so…

There’s Never Any Time!

Many faculty already feel limited in their time and resources so the thought of spending time doing something they don’t necessarily have to do for their job is off-putting to some. When I was a new faculty, I certainly felt the time crunch and as though I was just trying to stay afloat so there wasn’t much space for creative thinking at that time. The amount of roles, activities, committees, etc. that faculty are required to pour time into is a barrier for anything extra. But I’d rather spend extra time or protect my time to work on creative, fun and playful endeavors so to me it’s a choice…You make time for what matters to you.

Habit and Modeling

I think we can become creatures of habit in a sense where rigid lecture is modeled to us so it’s what we know and so when we’re finally faculty, we end up doing it that way too. Then our students see us teach in that way and then if they enter a teaching position, then it gets mindlessly passed down from generation to generation of academics. But if we recall boring lectures from our training days, we can admit we never learned very well that way so we need to be mindful about our approach to try something new.

Systems of Academia

As faculty, we are told to be innovative and creative and yet we are not rewarded for those things. Promotion and merit reviews tend to value quantity over quality. How many committees are you on? How many publications did you get? How many classes did you teach? How many students did you advise? These evaluation measures do not reward or support innovation, change, or reflective practice. How can we value a more playful, flexible, innovative approach if we don’t allow space for tinkering or failure? Sometimes the structure of higher ed and the policies we must navigate around limit our ability for excellence in teaching. To this I say: How can I break the rules without breaking the game?

Social Scripts of Play in Adulthood

There is a bias in adulthood and in academia that says seriousness equates to rigor and so anything that’s playful is often considered trivial or “soft” thus not holding students to high standards. This issue deserves much more space than I have given it here but the bottom line is, how we have been socialized to believe that play is something done by kids and not serious adults, is problematic. It’s problematic for our health and well-being and it’s problematic for providing adequate space and legitimacy for faculty to break out of the serious mold. We must resist societal messages that mandate people to one way of thinking and behaving. It’s a trap. It’s mind control. 

Deadpan Perception

The systems of academia as well as the social scripts of play in adulthood make it that a playful approach isn’t always taken seriously. This can lead to faculty feeling as though they need to fit the mold of seriousness. So, in the quest to be taken seriously, respected, and seen as a rigorous academic, we avoid playfulness like the plague. It’s fear-based mostly. But, like Will Smith says in After Earth: “danger is very real, but fear is a choice.” I truly don’t believe being playful is something that will get us fired. It might make some “deadpans” (as Alison James and Chrissi Nerantzi say) view you differently but in the end, whose approval do you really need? If you didn’t get your parent’s approval when you were little, you will be more likely to need the approval of other people as an adult. Okay, I promised I wouldn’t go all counselor on you but I just couldn’t help myself there. But there comes a point where we have to stop worrying about external perception and just follow our instinct and passions. If you limit your playfulness because you fear how you will be perceived, I dare you to try out counseling to work through that unmet need. 

So, there you have it. That pesky wall isn’t so scary. I like to view the wall prohibiting playfulness as a game to win. The reward? Playfulness! Joy! Fun! Career longevity, because without play, I’m toast. 

De-Educating Play

by | May 17, 2021 | Commentary

by David Thomas 

I’ve changed my mind about what it really means to be a professor at play.  It starts with how natural it is to play, travels through higher education’s participation in the de-education of play and ends up with me seeing a new mission in my teaching.

Let me start at the beginning.

When we are kids, we don’t need any coaching to play. Instead, life as a kid is a constant search for play.  The usual limits on kids’ play includes sleep and just as often adults. The grown-ups always stand at the ready to tell kids to stop goofing around and pay attention, to stop wiggling and eat their dinner, to cut the chatter and pay attention. Kids play. Adult modulate play.

And while there is a clear benefit to teaching kids to do things beyond play, somewhere along the way it gets out of control and we grow up thinking of play as childlike.  Play is one thing. Life is another. And that’s a tragedy, as the late, great Bernie Dekoven wrote in his book, A Playful Path:

“We have been taught to distrust play. Worse, we have been taught that we are not and should not be playful.  We have been taught that play is childish, immature, destructive. Taught by people who have themselves lost the path, who were themselves taught by people who believed that fun was, can you believe this: sinful. Taught by people who have inherited a broken culture where common sense has been replaced by common senselessness. Taught that if we work hard enough and long enough and live a life that is dull enough, we will be rewarded – when fun is the reward.” 

I was thinking about this turn away from play while listening to a panel that included Peter Gray  and Stewart Brown. They talked a lot about the benefits of play and touched on how education was letting us down.

What I heard was a clarion call for all professors at play. For me. 

I was thinking. “Where do we learn to set-aside playfulness?” While it certainly happens over a long period of time through a large number of cultural forces, I can’t help but see that higher education has mastered the removal of play and the insertion of a dour seriousness. Going to college is a rite of passage for many, and the passage is from the world of children to the world of adults. That’s a noble purpose. But it comes at a cost. We’ve been party to the great de-education of humans away from play. Admit it. We’ve seen It happen right in front of our eyes.

It wasn’t on purpose, and we have not all participated in that de-education to the same degree.  But you know what I am talking about. The rhetoric of higher education is critical thinking, rational debate, graded performance and good jobs. Sure, we allow a little room for fun—a sorority here, a fraternity there. But in the classroom, we get down to business, the serious business of teaching everything except how to play.

I am almost ashamed to admit that this realization just occurred to me. Then again, it’s a subtilty easy to miss. We have a status quo that hides play and we get used to not thinking about it. Play is a left turn in a world that always is asking us to turn right.

But when I think about my own journey as a playful professor, I see how I missed this turn. When I first walked into the classroom many years ago, I was afraid of being called out as a fraud. So, I wore a tie and was more serious that a doctor giving a patient a terminal illness diagnosis. As I found some comfort in my own teaching skin, I loosened up and would crack jokes. I learned along the way this was a called social presence and it was a good thing for your teaching.  I coasted along on instructionally clear outcomes and assessments and my humorous style for years. When Lisa and I formed Professor at Play, I started to think more intentionally about how to use play to engage students in learning and re-engage myself into teaching. I thought I’d reached the pinnacle of play at the university.

Then, just the other day, I realized I was only halfway there. Here’s what I have decided:

My true mission as a teacher is to help facilitate a certain kind of transformation in the lives of my students we call education. I want to show them new things, help them think about new things and guide them to develop habits of thinking in new ways. Sure, my discipline is architecture and what I teach is a bit bounded by that. But really, my goal is broader than the specific design objectives of my courses in the past. Now, as someone who believes in the power of play inside and outside of the classroom, I need to bring that into what I teach, and not just how I teach.

 As I work on the course I am set to teach this summer, I know I have all the academic bona fides to cover the topics in the course I have designed. But now I must challenge myself to start teaching my students how to unlearn being no fun. I’ve always had a purpose in my teaching. But now I have a mission. To help my students learn how to play again. That might be the most important gift I can give my students—the re-education of play.

I’m excited to realize this, but also a little scared. It sounds like hard work. It sounds risky. I am not even sure my students wont balk at the thought that they can play AND learn. But I have seen enough evidence and have enough support that I know it will be OK. If nothing else, this ought to be fun!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emotions and Brain States LOVE Play

by | May 10, 2021 | Commentary, Inspiration, Resources

Emotions and Brain States LOVE Play

by Lisa Forbes

Before becoming an educator, I was first a mental health counselor. One of my very first counseling jobs was in an inpatient psychiatric hospital. The patients were struggling with severe mental health concerns – typically suicidal ideation, homicidal ideation, or some form of psychosis. It seemed that the longer someone worked there, the more likely they’d be to have negative views of the patients, didn’t believe patients or trust them. As a new counselor, this was disheartening for me – I didn’t want to become that. I wondered what was the breakdown and is there an antidote to professional negativity?

I’ve learned a lot from my work as a counselor and one thing is: I don’t think we can truly help someone until we are able to see the complexity of the human sitting in front of us. As a counselor, my effectiveness depends on my ability to see the humanity in people, their emotions, and attempt to understand their lived experience. And all of this is a choice and takes effort. Although education is different from counseling in many ways, it’s not all that different. Educators are in the business of human development. We are in the business of inspiring students to think critically, to grow and to expand their skill sets and mindsets. 

But oftentimes, I’ve witnessed academia being less than humanistic – the common and traditional approach we take to educating students demonstrates that…as well as some of the negative comments about students that I have seen. We need to consider why we teach in the way we teach and maybe see students in a different light. Of course we won’t be able to know our students’ stories on a deep and vulnerable level like a counselor would (and I don’t think we need that type of depth in education) but I do think we can see students more holistically and consider their emotions and brain states to challenge the ways we are static and ineffective in education. As well as considering how the status quo of academia may be limiting our effectiveness yet often goes unexamined.

We need to approach our teaching differently as well as see students differently –  beyond bodies in our classrooms. We have to understand our students on a humanistic level and consider how their brains work in the learning process. The traditional lecture-based mode of teaching does not produce the most optimal brain states for learning – the brain is poorly designed for formal instruction (Jansen & McConchie, 2020). I think formal education can actually make students passive, bored, and anxious. But, instead of blaming students, what if we attempted to see students holistically? What if we adjusted our approach to meet students where they’re at and design the learning environment to what they might need emotionally and to what their brains might need to learn best?

If we recall that the brain is the organ that drives all learning through the process called neuroplasticity (i.e., the brain’s ability to change, reorganize, and remap itself). Neuroplasticity is a vital consideration for academics (Jansen & McConchie, 2020) because we can either create an environment that optimizes students’ brain states for learning or we can create an environment that negatively impacts learning and minimizes neuroplasticity. And then depending on our awareness and our ability to take accountability – we can blame students for not being motivated and engaged learners. 

To enhance neuroplasticity and the learning process, there are various neurotransmitters that are responsible for strengthening that process. First of all, the stress hormone, cortisol, is actually detrimental to neuroplasticity so students who come to class with an anxious brain or who experience classroom environments that don’t soothe the anxious brain are fighting against the learning process (Jansen & McConchie, 2020; Taylor & Marineau, 2016). Dopamine is driven by joy, pleasure, and the reward response and higher levels of this hormone increase motivation, attention, and memory. Norepinephrine increases students’ mood and enhances their ability to concentrate by generating a sense of urgency and excitement. Acetylcholine is vital for learning as it is involved in memory and is released when we experience surprise and novelty. Oxytocin is released during social interaction and closeness with others. This neurotransmitter is important for learning as it increases students’ sense of safety in the environment and trust in others involved in the learning process. Oxytocin also lowers the threat that the brain perceives in the environment. For more on the citations used for this section: (Jansen & McConchie, 2020; Tang, 2017, Taylor & Marineau, 2016). 

So, if we can understand what neurotransmitters are responsible for and strengthen neuroplasticity, and if you know what types of experiences can release more of those neurotransmitters in students’ brains, you can better design your learning space and mode of education to support that process. Below is a compilation of the conditions and emotions conducive to brain-based learning and increasing the presence of those positive neurotransmitters.

  • Novelty 
  • Social connection
  • Relevance
  • Fun
  • Play
  • Engagement
  • Humor
  • Safety
  • Variety
  • Enjoyable activities
  • Surprise
  • Joy
  • Alertness
  • Motivation
  • Curiosity
  • Creativity
  • Relaxation
  • Excitement
  • Focus/attention
  • Effort
  • Trust

*This list and information on neurotransmitters are a compilation from brain-based and play-based learning literature. See references below. 

If you can increase these conditions and emotions in a classroom, you might increase the presence of the joy, learning, and concentration neurotransmitters involved in learning. But if you think about a traditional or typical classroom in higher education, does it support novelty, social connection, fun, engagement, humor, enjoyable activities, surprise, creativity, curiosity, etc.? Maybe somewhat but I’d venture to guess academia needs a learning overhaul. Otherwise, why do students often consider learning to be a chore or burden? 

What’s worse, I think as faculty we often blame students for being bored or disengaged and we expect or hope that they will be curious, open, and excited. But, we have more influence over their brain states and learning stance than we think – we just have to take accountability for how we are influencing them. Jansen and McConchie (2020) believe educators often look at teaching as “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.” Essentially, I’m teaching them all of the facts and content they need to know but I can’t make them learn and when they struggle to learn we often blame the student. But what if we changed our perspective from you can’t make a horse drink to how can we inspire the horse to be thirsty (Jansen & McConchie, 2020). How can we inspire students to be more engaged and establish an environment that is more conducive to learning?

I’m pretty sure the answer is play but I might be biased. But, I’m also right. 

 

References 

Brown, S. (2009). Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination, and invigorates the soul. New York, NY: The Penguin Group.

Hsu, A., & Malkin, F. (2011). Shifting the focus from teaching to learning: Rethinking the role of the teacher educator. Contemporary Issues in Education Research, 4(12), 43.

Jensen, E., & McConchie, L. (2020). Brain-based learning: Teaching the way students really learn. (Third ed.). SAGE Publications.

Tang, Y. (2017). Brain-based learning and education: Principles and practice. Academic Press, an imprint of Elsevier.

Taylor, K., & Marienau, C. (2016). Facilitating learning with the adult brain in mind: A conceptual and practical guide (First ed.). Jossey-Bass. 

Wang, S., & Aamodt, S. (2012). Play, stress, and the learning brain. Cerebrum (New York, NY), 2012, 12-12.

 

A Playvolution…Are You In?

by | May 3, 2021 | Commentary

A Playvolution…Are You In?

by Lisa Forbes

I look at the picture of students listening to a lecture and I think: This is education? Why do we continue to drone on and on at students like this? Where’s the joy? Where’s the fun? Where’s the excitement? I’m sure you could find some other photos with some more engaged students but this picture isn’t all that unrealistic to what a typical classroom in higher education looks like. Even for faculty who are more flexible, creative, and innovative, I’d argue they still get caught up in the status quo sometimes. I know I do. I think that’s the trap of status quos, they are extremely hard to escape. The whole system is built around it, all the players continually feed into it, and it becomes almost unnoticeable and unrecognizable. It just becomes the norm, the standard. Like a fish swimming in water, it becomes hard to know anything but the water. 

As much as passive lecture-based approaches are the norm in many classrooms, I’d venture to guess that many students are bored, uninspired, and disengaged. I came across a blog (as far as I can tell, a serious blog) called 45+ Things to Do in a Boring Lecture. As I read through these ideas, I started wondering: So, this is how we have come to know education. That learning is boring. Lectures are boring. It’s just what happens in education so just need to survive it and slug through until you can graduate and never have to learn again. Yuck! So…you need to research things to do in order to survive a boring lecture.

I’m starting to wonder if students and or faculty even believe it can be something entirely different. I am personally trying to escape the all-encompassing ‘water’ of academia and lecture-based learning to explore how else it could be. I realize that there’s more than one way to be an effective and engaging educator but what I believe in is playful pedagogy. Last year I designed a study of my students’ experiences of learning with a playful pedagogy and the data has me even more convinced. Below is a quote from one of my student participants and I think it hits the nail on the head about how students might feel:

“Everything about grad school feels non-fun-oriented: extensive program handbooks, performative quizzes, unnecessarily complex assignments, formidable grading and attendance policies, all of which seem designed to discipline rather than educate; loads and loads of reading which is never discussed or applied in class, and so it feels removed from usefulness. Play provided an uplifting break from the seriousness of all this. My experience has shown that the value of play in learning is not to be underestimated. The incorporation of a little levity and a laugh has been life-affirming in general, but has also felt useful in creating a spaciousness for learning that is palpable, and palpably absent in other classes where the focus is more on performative quizzes and lengthy PowerPoint presentations. I feel better primed to learn when it’s not quite so rigid a class environment. The spaciousness has been invaluable.”

What have we done to education? 

I know there are some exceptional faculty doing amazing things in their teaching. But even with some faculty being different, innovative, playful, or flexible, I’d argue that the overall script of academia aligns with this student’s experience. This student’s words pretty well reflect the core of our educational system and I think that’s a problem. 

If we take a step back from our everyday lived reality and dare to step out of the water, can we consider education differently? Can it be fun, joyful, energizing, and novel? Can we do things in a way that earns our students attention and motivation instead of expecting it or demanding it simply because they are paying to earn their degrees? Personally, I dream of a playful culture where the process of learning and earning a degree isn’t regarded as a burden and a chore. Let’s call it a playvolution. You in?

A 2020 Reflection

by | Dec 28, 2020 | Commentary

Here’s to Hoping 2020 Leaves a Playful Residue

by Lisa Forbes

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.” Charles Dickens

I am a mental health counselor and I can’t help but apply what I know about counseling and the change process to the problems of faculty life and higher education. (Higher education needs lots of therapy, but that’s a whole other blog post). In terms of change, you cannot avoid problems. You cannot simply continue to do the same things and expect a different outcome. To change, you have to face your fears head on. You have to go straight through the uncertainty and discomfort – you don’t get to go around it. And oftentimes, people don’t realize they need to change until they’re put through a difficult situation. 

So, 2020 was a shit show of a difficult situation. It pushed us outside of our comfort zones for sure. It’s made many of us have to completely rethink and redesign how we do our jobs. It’s been downright brutal for many people. So, is there a lesson we can take from 2020? To not take routines for granted? Not to get too comfortable with the way we know things to be? To be ready at any instant to be flexible and reconceptualize…everything? I hope all of these things were lessons learned but I also daydream about the kinds of invigorating change people have found from plowing through the discomfort. 

It’s easy to lose perspective on life at times. Admittedly, it easily happens to me, but I try to do an exercise with my kids where when something bad happens (after I let them feel the sadness/frustration/etc, because I’m a counselor after all) I ask them: “What good came from this?” Even in the most difficult times in our lives I think we can always find something good that came from it. As I reflect on the past year, I can honestly say that, for me, the development of the Professors at Play community was a huge piece of good that came from the pandemic. This community has inspired me, given me a sense of camaraderie, and allowed me to deepen my understanding of play and my allegiance to it within the learning process. 

I hope that Professors at Play had some small part in the change process for others too. I hope that heaps of other people realized the power and value of play. That’s a huge part of our dreams for Professors at Play – that it will provide the push or the support that inspires people to become more playful. Leading them to increasingly infuse play into their lives and their teaching. It was unintentional that Professors at Play was developed during a global pandemic – it just kind of happened that way. But, looking back over this year, what wonderful timing! 

At a time when many people were struggling with the abrupt transition to teaching virtually – play seemed to save the day. (Doesn’t it always though?) At a time when teaching became a foreign and uncertain endeavor for many, play seemed like an antidote. I don’t think everyone joined Professors at Play for the same reasons. Some would have joined pre-pandemic but I think many joined to survive teaching through the pandemic. And for those people, I hope they initially joined Professors at Play for the “tips and tricks” to make their digital teaching more engaging but I hope they exit the pandemic with play as their trusted sidekick to their teaching – digital or otherwise. 

That is, I hope that play wasn’t a pit stop for people as they find their way back to “normal.” Instead, I hope they plowed straight through the uncertainty and difficulty and found play. And at the same time, I just bet that play helped people plow through the uncertainty and difficulty of this year. Play is pretty cool like that. But, wouldn’t it be fun if when the COVID dust settles, we emerge from the smoke and find ourselves more playful? And we find that higher education is more tolerant and welcoming of play in tertiary learning. And we don’t take ourselves so seriously.

I hope that the play movement will create a seismic shift in the philosophical underpinning of higher education…I’m getting all sweaty just thinking of such a world. Because play matters and I think it would allow us to break free of some tired traditions that prohibit us from reaching the very things we say we’re all about. And, for higher education, that would certainly be a big ol’ heap of good that came from 2020. 

Wholehearted People Play

by | Dec 22, 2020 | Commentary

Vulnerability and Play

by Lisa Forbes 

What does vulnerability have to do with play? Well, lots. Let me explain. In this post – it’s twofold.

 

The First Fold

Brene Brown’s work on vulnerability and shame have a loads of value for education. Both teaching and learning. Vulnerability leads to desired student outcomes, valuable connections, and authentic classrooms. It makes what we do more effective and what students learn more meaningful. 

 

In her book, Daring Greatly, Brene says: “Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity.” If we, for a moment, come out from behind our pedagogical theories and tools, we can admit that perhaps one of the most vital aspects of education is about creating meaningful and transformative human experiences. Vulnerability is the core and the heart of meaningful human experiences. 

 

It’s curious, then, why both students and educators often attempt to avoid vulnerability when it holds so much value. It could be that it’s uncomfortable because vulnerability is often equated with weakness, or maybe it’s that we just don’t know how. So, we try to avoid vulnerability because we don’t want to appear weak, we don’t want to “fail,” we don’t want to lose our credibility or power – and probably several other reasons. Yet, when we dismiss vulnerability as weakness it means we have limited our efficacy and authenticity.

 

Yet, hypocritically, we expect that our students demonstrate vulnerability themselves. I don’t believe we can ask students to be vulnerable (i.e., try something new, be creative, risk making a mistake, be open, etc.) unless we are also modeling those things. Obviously, this is a much larger issue than I intended on writing about here but the connection to play is that play is often vulnerable – especially in a setting where play isn’t normally included or expected (e.g., higher education classrooms). When we open ourselves up to play and we include play into our teaching – that can feel vulnerable.

 

But if we are following the research and wise words of Brene Brown, being vulnerable in play is exactly what we need to do. Vulnerability through play allows for connection, belonging, innovation, creativity, joy, authenticity, accountability, etc. So, in my mind, we are doing ourselves (and our students) a huge disservice by avoiding or limiting play in the classroom. 

 

Okay, Second Fold

This fold is all about living wholeheartedly – as Brene calls it. In her research, she began seeing people who just seemed to live better, more joyously than others – more wholeheartedly. Brene developed ten guideposts for living wholeheartedly and – you guessed it – cultivating play is one of them. 

 

This seems easy enough. Just play…

 

It’s never that easy though. In a culture where play is seen as trivial or a waste of precious time, it’s hard to allow yourself time to play. The cultural message is this: in order to be successful and a serious adult, you must be overworked, stressed, and busy. Play is often seen as the opposite of work and productivity. So, we think in order to keep up, to be a successful professional, we must push play aside. But that’s a huge mistake because play is vital to living well. I even think that play actually allows you to be more productive and professional. Play reduces stress and leaves you feeling centered and increases your focus and concentration. I also believe that play can even help you be a better professional and more effective at your job. Play allows you to approach problems from a different lens – a more creative lens – which then allows you to engage with your work in a more meaningful and flexible way. 

 

Despite the evidence and all of the connections between play and everything we desire in our lives, I’m continuously shocked by our rejection of play in adulthood. 

 

You want to live better? Play.

You want to be more creative? Play.

You want to be better connected to people? Play.

You want to be more effective in your job? Play.

You want to reduce your stress and anxiety? Play.

You want to laugh more? Play.

You want to live longer? Play.

 

I could go on like this all day. But you get the point.