At the 2008 Serious Play Conference, Tim Brown, the CEO of the “innovation and design” firm IDEO, asked the audience to take the piece of paper they had been given and quickly draw the person sitting beside them. After their 30 seconds was up, the group was giggling, embarrassed and apologizing to their neighbors.

Tim then contrasted this experience with doing the same exercise with young children. Children don’t laugh, get shy or apologize, he explained. Instead they’re simply excited to take on the exercise and show off their work when they’re done.

Why the difference between the adults and the children?

As adults, we fear the judgment of our peers. We also fear not being right and executing a task poorly. Young children don’t worry about this. They simply get on with their creative vision. Tim explains that this judgment, this need to be right, stifles creativity and leads to conservative thinking.

Tim, being the CEO of IDEO, a firm on a mission to fuse design, business and social life to help companies re-think their business or product, needs fearless, creative types around him 24/7.

Tim believes that play in the workplace is essential if you want your group to generate big, fresh ideas.

But, in order for someone to feel comfortable enough to play, they have to feel secure, so it’s about creating an environment that is relaxed and fun.

It’s even about friendship, because it’s more fun to play, create and build with people who you genuinely enjoy spending time with. The whole process of work (if you want to call it that) actually evolves into something that more closely resembles play.

Check out Tim Brown’s talk at 2008 Serious Play Conference. Let us know what you think!

Hello again! We’re back with Part 8 in our 19-Part FinerMinds series on Becoming Just Awesome. This week we’re going to cover something almost everyone struggles with every now and then: Negative Self-Talk.

What is negative self-talk, you ask. It’s that nagging voice in your head that pours you a negative cocktail of half-truths, poor logic and distortions of reality. It’s your mind interpreting events and circumstances (whether external or internal) through a lens of pessimism and self-loathing. Overall, it’s a big problem, and far too many people struggle with it.

Most of us don’t even realize how bad our negative self-talk is. When it comes to ourselves and how we perceive the world, we tear ourselves down and adopt a ‘glass half empty’ approach to life. We do this so often, it becomes a habit or a set pattern of thinking. Far too often we get ourselves into these negative thought spirals. Unfortunately, it’s extremely damaging.

I want you to meet Elizabeth. To most observers, Liz has ‘got it all’. Liz is a doctor. She’s 34 years old. She’s attractive; runs half marathons; is funny, outgoing and smart; and has a great circle of family and friends who love her to bits. She also has a kind and handsome fiancé who would do almost anything for her.

Now let’s get inside Liz’s head. What does Liz think about herself? You’d think with all she has going for her she’d be the happiest person on the planet, right? Wrong.

Liz suffers from some serious negative self-talk. She beats herself up because she thinks she’s not as intelligent and accomplished as other doctors because she’s just a general practitioner and not a specialist. She gets down on herself because she isn’t a real marathon runner; she just runs half-marathons. She loses sleep over the fact that she’s 34 and doesn’t have children yet. She worries incessantly that she’s not young enough or attractive enough for her fiancé because he is just so amazing (she secretly thinks “why would he want to be with me?”). All this negative self-talk often leaves Liz feeling anxious, depressed and exhausted, though she tries not to let it show.

It’s completely absurd for Liz to think and feel this way, but she continues to do so. At this point, it’s automatic for her. Actually, she doesn’t even know she does it. And neither do you, I imagine.

How often do you monitor your thoughts? Probably not very often, if you’re like most people. Spend a day simply observing what you think about. Observe what your mind is expressing about you and the world. Is it going: “You’re awesome! You can do it! Life rocks!”?  Or is it going: “Don’t even bother. You don’t stand a chance. The world is against you.” If you’ve got the latter going on, you need help. Continuous negative self-talk will make you miserable and bitter.

But there are steps you can take to manage and minimize negative self-talk.

• Simply becoming aware of your negative self-talk is the first step.
• Understanding the origin of your negative self-talk and the mechanisms behind it is the second part.
• Finally, it is important to practice exercises that will slowly re-program you to process information in a positive light.

When we’re in a bad mood, most of us can say why we’re in a bad mood. We can identify the ‘trigger’, whether it was our boss yelling at us or not being able to fit into our pants because we gained five pounds. What we fail to consider is the role our thoughts play in all this. We just look at the trigger and mood and see a direct relationship.

We fail to take responsibility for the fact that how we process an event is what leads us down the path to feeling angry and upset. We think the trigger is the cause. WRONG. How we process the event is the cause. We need to take responsibility and learn how to process information differently, in a more positive light.

I highly recommend watching the video below. Dr. Darryl Cross, an Executive and Personal Coach as well as a clinical psychologist, elegantly explains how we get ourselves into this negative self-talk mess.

He’s even going to show you an exercise to get you thinking positively in two weeks.

Enjoy! And let me know how the exercise works for you!