You Don't Need More Strategy - You Need More Play

How do you bring play into an area of your life where normally you wouldn't think of

play? It's hard.

It's really hard.

I think we have to be so adaptable as humans and play teaches us that.

It teaches us to learn and to fail and to keep moving forward in a safe environment so that we have those skills to fall back on when it's a little bit less playful or when we face like really real challenges.

What it comes down to is play can be a mindset, too.

We like to think of defining play as a state, but also as a trait.

So this cognitive disposition of playfulness, of showing up in the world with this sense of curiosity and creative problem solving.

For instance, when an athlete gets injured.

How can you still honor and create challenges for yourself? If an athlete is competitive, if I have a lower body injury, I'm going to try and do one extra pull up a day and create like a little challenge and make the rehab fun and interesting.

I ruptured my Achilles at the end of my career and we had this ramp by our strength and conditioning room.

And each day I would come in on this scooter and I had this obstacle course set up for the scooter and I would go down the ramp in like aero mode as fast as I could.

And we would measure the distance that I would make every day.

When we think of

play, we think of children, right? We think of playgrounds and we are outside playing imaginary games.

But when you bring it into the business world, what can we play with? Creating games, creating challenges that can be fun, igniting curiosity, being curious in places where you might normally shut down.

When we hear the word play, it really can sound almost

optional.

We really misunderstand play as a society as a whole.

We dismiss it as childish, as frivolous, as a waste of time, as something to be done when the real work is over.

That could not be more wrong.

And I just want to explain why that is on a biological level first, because that's what gives us the permission to prioritize it.

There was a leading study done by a neuroscientist named Jacques Pongsep where he removed the cortex of a group of rats and he compared them to a control group.

What he found is that both groups of rats played the same way.

He was able to conclude that play is a primary brain circuit emotion that is embedded in our subcortex, the most ancient part of our brain, meaning that it is inherent, not learned.