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Well, actually, if you’ve read any of my other posts, you are probably aware of the secret! Today, we’re going to learn more about this language however, and hopefully become more fluent in it as we gain a greater understanding of how it works. We’re looking at play, and it’s connection to creativity, because play is the language in which our creative genius speaks most fluently to us.
Many of you have completed my play personality/creative character survey and know which kind of play personality you inhabit the most, so we’re going to investigate how these play personalities connect you to your creativity. I’ve trumpeted away about how play holds the keys to how we access our individual form of creative expression, but I’ve never spent an entire article going into depth on why this is so and how it really does this. Last week, I was directed by a friend to an interesting article about play and creativity, in particular the link between our childhood play and creativity.
This post was written by a man named Gabor George Burt, funnily enough, I’ve never encountered his work on creativity. But when I researched him, I found this; “Gabor George Burt is an internationally recognized expert on strategy, innovation, creativity and business development. A leading proponent of Value Innovation and Blue Ocean Strategy for over a decade, Gabor has also gained recognition as a thought-leader on the creative perspective of Defying Conventional Wisdom.” Goodness, that’s quite a cool phrase, “a thought-leader on the creative perspective of Defying Conventional Wisdom.”
More importantly however, this man seems to have connected similar dots as far as play and creativity are concerned. An interesting thing about this is, Gabor doesn’t go into detail about how the play and creativity connection works, he’s promised to do so in his next post. So, brace yourselves dear readers, we’re about launch! AND, I’m going to be bouncing back over to Gabor’s take on this same subject and sharing with you the link, so we can compare notes and see what new insights can surface.
Remember from a previous post, that in order to access and express creativity and innovation, we need freedom and autonomy. Play is integral to the creative process because, as Dr. Stuart Brown states, the essence of play is freedom. Dr. Stuart Brown is the world authority on play behavior in humans and he has described 7 fundamental elements that characterize authentic play. We’re going to look at the 7 elements, so we can see clearly that these elements are deeply ingrained in the creative process. I’ll be quoting Dr. Brown then adding my own commentary about how this connects with creativity at the end of each element.
1. “Play is apparently purposeless, done for it’s own sake. It doesn’t help in getting money or food, it doesn’t have a (recognized) survival value.” I added the word ‘recognized’ into Dr. Brown’s quote, I’ll come back to that later. Now, why is purposelessness (that’s a very hard word to say, physical challenge – try repeating it three times) so important to our creative process?
Purposeless play is connected to improvisational potential. I’ve mentioned that in order to think creatively, we need to be able to think holistically, to use our ability to take as many disparate themes and concepts as possible and draw insights from them. This is what happens in purposeless play. Because of the inherently purposeless nature of authentic play, we naturally slip into a holistic mind set. If you look back at my articles on different techniques to access creativity, you will find a lot of the techniques are designed to get you to engage in “purposeless play” or to shift your thinking process to holistic rather than linear.
The biggest hindrance to accessing our creative or holistic thinking ability is to be intently focused on getting some outcome, figuring something out, or under stress and pressure to produce a result. This is the opposite of purposeless play, and we become locked in narrow, linear thinking. Purposeless play does not and cannot happen by consciously thinking about it! We have to literally be playing, just for the fun of it, and allow it to happen naturally, to become absorbed in our playful activity.
We could begin the play activity with the intention of gathering some insights about a problem we’re working on, but consciously thinking about the problem has to be left at the doorway to play in order for us to access the kind of thinking needed to find our answers. So, that’s the first major connection between play and accessing our creativity, let’s move on.
2. “Play is voluntary, not obligatory or a required duty.” Put another way, freedom and autonomy are vital to the creative process. This is something we’ve covered at length in previous articles. Basically, both play and creativity don’t exist without freedom and autonomy. So if we’re playing authentically, we’re in a very fertile creative space, because we’re engaged in something that is completely voluntary. We cannot be forced to play and we cannot be forced to be creative, by ourselves or anyone else. The very act of someone imposing their will or any kind of restraint (including our own self inflicted restraints) on us immediately closes down our ability to play authentically or think holistically/creatively.
You will hear me consistently reiterate that we need to allow the play and creative process to happen naturally, because it MUST, it’s the only way it works. It can’t be contrived or forced. We are naturally playful and creative beings, we’re born like this. When we were kids, we just did it, and we still do if we let ourselves, we inherently know how to be playful and creative.
3. “Play = Inherent attraction, it’s fun and it makes us feel good. Play is exciting and it’s a cure for boredom.” Dr. Brown says that nothing lights up the brain like play, referring to the increased neural connections being made when we’re engaged in playing. The experience of fun and excitement in play puts us in a heightened state mental and physical arousal (increased neural connections), which increases our creative thinking.
Visualize the massive influx of neural connections taking place in the brain during play, then translate that to our ability to take abstract themes and concepts and connect them to come up with creative and innovative solutions to problems. It’s a weird thing to comprehend, but literally, the more neural connections we generate through play, the more we’re able to make the connections needed for creative and innovative thinking.
4. “Play gives us a sense of freedom from time, when we’re fully engaged in play, we lose track of time.” Ha! There it is again, the “F” word! In relation to play and creativity, it just keeps coming up again and again doesn’t it? Most of us experience time as a very linear, sequential process. Remember what we’ve said about linear and sequential processes as far as creativity is concerned? Linear and sequential sucks when it comes to creativity! Certainly, we love process, as aforementioned, creativity is a process, not an event. But the creative process thrives on a multilevel, holistic and even cyclical approach.
Linear and sequential constraints of time totally mess with play and creativity, if we allow these constraints to dictate our creative brainstorming. This is, understandably, a big issue we all face. We live in a world where we are constantly under time constraints, and we have to deal with that, but we can and do, every day. The trick is to ensure you give yourself the time out needed in any given moment or day to recharge and refresh your creative batteries. Ensure that when you do give yourself this time out, you do whatever you need to get into a play state where you become totally absorbed and don’t clock watch. Of course, sometimes it isn’t possible to leap away from your work and immerse yourself in play, but I do this whenever I can if the need arises.
Two paragraphs ago, I lay on the couch for 15 minutes as I was hit with a wave of tiredness after being up very early for an interview. I have to be relaxed, awake and alert to make the mental connections needed to write this article on play and creativity. If I find myself losing this state, I go outside and talk to my chickens, move my body physically, or lie down (you may remember the creativity enhancing technique called “lying down on the job,” I was quite animated in my joy at finding scientific proof that it improved creative thinking!).
All of these things are a combination of play and relaxation for me, and they shift my mind temporarily from a single pointed focus and let it slip into a kind of soft focus that’s characteristic for me when I’m thinking holistically. Even lying down is a form of play, as my mind is allowed to wander off on it’s own little tangents like a curious child and I give myself permission to let it forget about what I’ve been focusing on. If I allow myself to lose track of time briefly through play to recharge myself for creative thinking and writing, I know my work will improve as a result. Again, many of the techniques given in previous articles are designed to absorb the person in a way that they will lose track of time, ie, shift out of their sequential and linear thinking process.
5. “Play gives us a diminished consciousness of self. We stop thinking or caring about what others think. We are fully in the moment, in flow, or the zone.” Having a diminished consciousness of self is a massive part of being successful with our creative and innovative thinking. Researchers have done studies proving that people will knowingly give incorrect responses to questions if they think being right will set them apart from the group or make them appear different. What’s this got to do with creativity and play? It has a lot to do with a diminished consciousness of self and caring what others think.
If we, as humans are so wired to be concerned about fitting into a group that we will knowingly give incorrect answers just to ensure we belong, then finding a way to trip this hard-wiring is vital to our creative abilities. We can (and will) stifle our creative insights if we’re concerned what others might say or think about them, or in other words, if we’re sensitive to external judgment or criticism (and we are). Play is our trip wire, as Dr. Brown has stated, in authentic play, we stop caring about what others think, and we lose our sense of self-consciousness.
Ask any creative, if they’re concerned about what someone thinks of their work, how badly does it mess with their creative process? Ask yourself this same question in relation to anything you’re working on, if you care too much about what others think, does it diminish your ability to do it well? Being able to immerse our selves deeply in any activity so that external influence or approval doesn’t interfere with our creative process is vital to our success. It’s through play that we can find the path to this lack of self-consciousness. After all, we’re just playing right? It’s no big deal, it’s a game and we don’t place the same expectations on ourselves when we’re playing, and neither do others. Play gives us the “out” we need to shake off the expectations of ourselves and other people, and open up to our creative potential.
6. “Play allows for improvisational potential. We aren’t locked into rigid ways of thinking or doing things. We are open to serendipity or chance…we stumble upon new behaviors, thoughts, strategies, movements, or ways of being. We see things in a different way and have fresh insights…You never know what’s going to happen when you play.” I mentioned at the beginning that purposeless play was connected to improvisational potential. We’ll look at this some more, as well as just how integral improvisational potential is to our creative process.
Obviously, our ability to improvise is an essential part of creativity and innovation. Improvisation is what takes us from a known to an unknown path. Improvisation is how we make a map to navigate unchartered territory. When we play, we allow ourselves to go off on tangents, to entertain unusual ideas or methods, and we allow ourselves to slip between what we know (or think we know) and the unknown. The same thing happens in our creative process. Both play and creativity require improvisational potential in order to flourish. Without it, the game stops, and so does the creative process.
Play is an important ally for accessing our creativity and improvisational potential because in a play state, we’re more open to it. The purposeless element of play allows us to recognize and respond to the things that might normally slip by unnoticed or unexplored if we were purely focused on an outcome. Through purposeless play, we let ourselves pick up seemingly random elements, and improvisation is the skill we use to makes sense of these elements. We then engage our creativity to express the discoveries of our improvisational play.
7. “Play involves continuation desire, we want to keep doing it, the pleasure of the experience drives this desire.” This aspect of play relates to fine tuning our creative gifts more than anything else. Continuation desire helps us achieve mastery, which is an innate human psychological need. I’ve mentioned previously that humans have three innate psychological needs. Dan Pink discusses them in his book “Drive.” Just to recap, these three needs are Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. Continuation desire is connected to fulfilling our need for mastery. I read that anyone who has achieved mastery has spent at least 10,000 hours practicing. I don’t think we’re going to achieve mastery in anything if it requires that much practice, unless we really love doing it. And what was that about play? Oh! Wow! We want to keep doing it and the pleasure of the experience drives this desire? Cool!
This last aspect of play in relation to our creativity really leads into another whole world of exploration, and that is Sir Ken Robinson’s work on finding our element. I spoke with Sir Ken’s co-author, Lou Aronica this morning about certain aspects of finding my element. (I’m busting to find out if Lou quotes me in Ken’s next book on “The Element” 
Basically, one of the things that quantifies finding my element for me is I want to keep coming back to it again and again. In other words, there is a strong continuation desire in my element; my element, which is my unique form of creative expression, is also a form of play for me. I would never put in the hours I do if I didn’t love what I am doing, my creative expression has to be a form of play for me in order to achieve any degree of mastery. And I’m pretty sure this is the same for anyone who has accomplished any level of mastery in their lives.
I’m going to have to leave it there, I honestly cannot drag you all into another world of Sir Ken Robinson and The Element, I’ve gone way over my preferred word count as it is. I truly hope the long read has been worth it, and it’s very clear to those who wanted to know, just how play is integral to our creative process, and how your preferred style of play shifts you into the alternate space you need to be in to access your creativity.
As you know, I’ve been working some more on my play personality/creative character survey. My aim is to make this an incredible resource of information about how to find your unique blend of play and creativity, and how you access these gifts. Like any creation, it’s constantly evolving, and I am loving the process. Next week, I am going to explain how each of the individual play personalities and certain activities and techniques cause the mental and emotional shift needed to access your creativity. Thanks so much for reading, and please leave any comments you have at the end of the article, I love hearing about other people’s creative insights and process.
Cheers, Neroli.
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