Mighty pup power, Ryder sir!
Written by Ben Tallon
I sat drinking my coffee this morning. 6.30am. The kids straight into a big 'Mighty pups' game. The kitchen table became the arctic, shelves various bases. One massive flow state, imaginations snowballing. Pure magic and a superb blueprint for what all creative meetings should be!
Sometimes I join in, but today I recognised I would only have punctuated the purity of the play, so I read my book and listened in. This state of mind is so natural for kids, but we too readily surrender it and shut down ideas as adults. Part of my coaching work is to show ways around that.
It isn’t something we do consciously, but over time, we accumulate fear-based characteristics and inhibitions like iron-filings. I refer to this as ‘the maturity trap’ - the herd mentality that makes us frightened to ‘make a dick of ourselves.’ But if you remove the social norms, isn’t it much more dickish to cut ourselves off from the joy and release of play, of the laughs we get from hijinx, imagination, and curiosity that helps humans stay invigorated and attuned with the world around us?
In my recent chat with Disney’s former head of innovation and creativity, Duncan Wardle, Duncan spoke of the need to disarm people in professional settings, to lead with topics that bring about laughter and release, instead of agendas and job titles. To free them from their ‘river of thinking.’ By this he meant company cultures and accepted norms that shoot down good ideas, or different thinking. He said that if you start with a topic such as ‘favourite childhood toy’, people very quickly loosen up, and the joy in the room opens the door between the fully-conscious state and the unconscious that brings out our lived experience and ideas-generating capacities.
Even in the school playground yesterday, as the kids pinballed around, fired up on the last day before the Christmas break, Mr Ramsey, the deputy headteacher stood grinning in his Santa pajamas, his beard painted red and green, adorned with twinkling festive lights. Every passing parent whooped and expressed their admiration of his commitment, and while the kids fawned over this, I saw that the infectious lightheartedness achieved exactly what Duncan Wardle was on about: it created unity, lured out our invaluable childhood selves, and everything ahead of us, no matter how turbulent things are in the wider world, felt possible, and magic.