Greetings from Barcelona☀️where I am looking for a freelance Online Content Manager. I’d love for it to be someone from The Quest community. Check out the job description here 👉 Content Manager JD.
🙌Many thanks for reading The Quest.
If you are joining for the first time, welcome to our deep dive into facilitation, learning, and how to live a creative life.
Let’s jump right in!
💼When I first started leading groups, I was focused on getting serious work done.
I was convinced that my role was keeping the session on track and getting through the agenda. I was focused on getting outcomes.
The result?
My sessions were pretty dull. I noticed quite a few people yawning. Even I had to stop myself from yawning. The results were not that exciting either.
💡Then I discovered play.
I started experimenting with bringing things like drawing, improv games, and creative challenges into meetings. At first, I was worried that it was going to backfire. And that my group members were going to think that I was totally nuts.
🪄And then magic happened.
My group members were more focused. There was laughter. People felt more energized. We came up with more innovative ideas. We got way more done and had more fun.
✨I learned that play is the magic ingredient to leading exceptional group sessions.
Play stimulates our curiosity and creativity. It connects us to others. It helps us come up with more innovative ideas. It increases our well-being and brings us joy.
But it can be hard to know how to bring more play into “serious” group work.
💭How do you bring more play into your groups and get things done?
That’s our Quest for this week🔎
👉 A must-read book on Play (with my takeaways)
👉 IDEO’s Play at Work Podcast
👉 Course Creator Lab’s free resources for facilitators
But First👇
🚀Registration for the Breakthrough Facilitation March cohort (March 15- April 7) is now open.
Learn to lead instantly engaging online sessions. Don’t miss your chance to save 40% when you register before February 20.
Join us for a free live demo session this Thursday, February 17. You can register for the demo on the course page👇
📙Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul
A book by Dr. Stuart Brown focuses on the effect and importance of play in our lives. If you are looking for solid scientific research on why play is vital to humans, this is your book. It helped me answer the question of why play is so effective in group work.
Here are my 5 main takeaways👇
👉Play is a profound biological process. It makes us smarter and more adaptable. It fosters empathy and makes complex social groups possible.
👉Play allows us to experiment. Through play, we create a temporary world and try new ideas out in a low-stakes way before we apply them to real life.
👉Play gets us in sync with others. It helps us connect and bond with those around us.
👉Play enhances learning. Play is like fertilizer for brain growth. It helps us remember. It motivates us and keeps our attention and interest.
👉The opposite of play is not work. Play supports work – neither one can thrive without the other. The opposite of play is depression.
“Sometimes I compare play to oxygen – it’s all around us, yet goes mostly unnoticed or unappreciated until it is missing.” Dr. Stuart Brown, Play
Check out Dr. Brown’s book 👉here and his 2008 TED talk 👉here.
📻IDEO U Podcast: Play at Work
A podcast episode from IDEO U play experts Brendan Boyle and Michelle Lee. In the podcast, they share small ways to experiment with play at work and how it helps surface new ideas.
Here are 3 practical tips I got from the podcast👇
👉Help group members enter a play mindset. Create an inviting space (online or in-person) and start with a warm-up to help people start dreaming.
👉Design for different creativity styles. Use a variety of methods including “heads-down” time for introverts and whole group interaction for extroverts.
👉Create a temporary space for dreaming. They call it a “Magic Circle”, where you can put constraints aside, and come up with wild ideas so you come up with better ideas.
Listen to the full podcast👉 here
How do you bring play into your meetings and sessions?
🧪Course Creator Lab’s Free Resources for Facilitators
If you don’t know the Course Creator Lab you are missing out! It’s the brainchild of Copywriter and Online Course Specialist Julia Saxena.
It’s full of free top-quality resources on course marketing, operations, teaching, and facilitation.
I was thrilled to contribute a guest post this week with a blog called Interactive Session Design 1O1.
💡Sketch of the week
 Moina Abdul February 14th, 2022 9 Retweets 87 Likes |
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Creatively yours,
P.S. You can catch up on the last edition 🧭 7 Ways I Learned Facilitation and all past editions here.
