Play more - Laugh more

In my life's motto "live, love, laugh everyday", I acknowledge the importance of laughing and smiling everyday, and it is worthwhile to explore what makes YOU smile and laugh.

The answers will be very different person by person. For some it’s dancing, for others it’s listening to music, for others playing with children, …. When looking at it closely, you will realise that many of the joyful activities are connected to playing ....... and to creativity which I have covered already in an earlier blog post.

So to make our lives more joyful, it’s worth investigating how we can integrate more play into our everyday lives. Yes, with smaller children in the family, it seems much simpler to play and laugh as a consequence, but let’s challenge ourselves: how can we play more even as adults?

Last Christmas, I created a 'Christmas Around the World'-Quiz with multiple choice questions that I had researched earlier on the internet, and we played it as a full family of 3 generations on Christmas Eve. It was such great entertainment, and we enjoyed so much good laughter.

I also love creating very personalized games for special occasions such as birthdays or weddings which put the 'special person(s) of the day' into the focus and the games serve as immaterial present as well as ice breaker for parties.

In business life, I remember truly fun moments when we played games in team building sessions – they always revealed some truths about ourselves and definitely strengthened our team spirit and enhanced motivation. Recently I came across the business transformation coach Michael Stratford who emphasized that playing is part of our DNA, suggesting to approach business challenges from a play perspective to unlock new thinking, out of the box-solutions.

Reflecting on my business life I have seen competitions to incentivize participation, to disseminate new strategies, to kick-start sharing of best practice cases and to acknowledge great executions in the market place.

I am sure that are many other ways to integrate gaming and play in business life, getting better results no matter what your goals – so the challenge is on!