Play Sets Us Free

How are you inviting your clients to play?

I'm sitting in a theater anteroom on Sunday morning with a collection of clowns, improvisers, burlesque performers, emcees, and cabaret artists. A gloriously varied group. Gender presentation was a delightful free-for-all. The workshop, Connect with the Crowd, is being led by Aunt Nance, billed as the musical comedy cougar and sex-positive, fun-loving, eccentrically talented aunt you've always wanted -- though she's not in costume today. And we're here to learn to emcee events.

The first order of business was to introduce ourselves . . . while playing "keep the beachball in the air with the group. Blowing away with laughter our carefully crafted social personas like so much dandelion fluff. Poof! And introducing the first underlying theme of the day: play sets us free.

How does any of this relate to coaching? Play sets us free.

Clients show up stuck with tunnel vision. We all do. It's the human condition. We all get stuck in spider webs of rules, beliefs, expectations, projections, and stories that no longer serve us. And keep us entangled where we are.

What's needed is not new information or even new skills, but a new context. A new place from which to experience ourselves. It's not a matter of adding knowledge, but of creating a whole-being shift in how we experience the world. Play sets us free. Play disrupts and re-contextualizes. Tears down boundaries and barriers to perceiving. Gives us new eyes. Opens a wider perspective. Grants us a lightness and sense of humor about ourselves. Gets us out of our heads and default habits of thinking.

One of the most impactful exercises in my own coaching training was giving my survival mechanism humorous names. "Gold-plated garbage can" still cracks me up!And that way lies freedom. And new possibilities.So, coaches, how are you inviting your clients to come out and play?

My two biggest take-aways from our workshop?

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