At the moment of writing this post, we stand at the precipice of summer. With Memorial Day behind us and the long stretch of warm months ahead, comes a little tinge in the brain, a little skip in the soul. For some of us it’s more like a loud gong of a bell – for others it is the slightest whisper of a long ago memory. You see on some level summer means play. Summer is about a shift in our mental state. Summer has a call to our deeper, more playful selves. Are you listening? Will you answer the call this time? Or will you, like so many of us, put your head back down to your desk and get on with the work at hand ignoring the impulse to play and the call of fun?

In my work, the most referenced thing lacking in people’s lives is fun. This got me thinking about fun and more importantly, play. What is the power of play and why is fun so freaking important to people? I did a little research and get this, it turns out that play is as important as sleep. Read that again. What?? It’s true. We’re biologically programmed to play. It supports memory, creativity, reduces stress, and builds trust and safety between individuals and within groups. A playful brain is a happy soul. And we’re talking about play that is not driven by a purpose; it’s simply the act for the act’s sake. In his work on play, Stuart Brown says that if its purpose is more important than the simple act, it’s probably not play. He also says that the opposite of play is not work but depression. Yikes. (Check out his talk on TED). Folks this is huge. Play is not simply fun, it’s kind of essential to almost everything we do! Read more…

Ah, change, change, change. We’re all after change.  We want to change our hair or change our clothes.  Change our spouse or change our house. We gotta change the way we drink or change what we think. Decrease how much we eat and increase the time on our feet. We wanna change the way we pray and for God’s sake … change what we say. Change the time we go to bed or change our name from Bernardo to Fred. Change our job, change our face, change our beliefs, can I change my race? Stop this, start that, more of this and less of that. Change, change, change. And then just when we grow tired of changing ourselves our gaze does a soft slide to the left and then an ever slow slither to the right. Looking through the scope, we set our cross hairs on some unsuspecting fool next to us, press the restart button and begin the whole process over again.

We all buy into the need for change. Our culture is built on it. It’s like somewhere along the way each of us signed a contract to never (ever)be satisfied with ourselves, our lives or each other. We’re not enough or we’re too much. I should be more like you or even better, “can’t you just be like me?” Either way, we come out the looser. 

Here’s the deal, the way most of us come at change carries the imbedded implication that something (and most of the time it’s us) is wrong or broken; a nagging, ever present sense that something needs to be fixed (“I’m not sure what it is, but give me a minute and I’m certain I can figure it out.”).  And with that implication comes judgment, a nice dose of shame or guilt (you get to pick) and a sweet slow dance with self denigration (who invited her anyway?). When our core belief is we’re wrong or broken, then when we reach for change, we reach out of fear or disgust or worse, just plain ‘ol unconscious habit. Read more…