The Surprising Power of Play with Acey Holmes

There are numerous essential needs that are important for human well-being, but one key component that is often overlooked is play. Unfortunately, play is frequently viewed as a silly activity that detracts from "serious" work. However, what if we were to reframe our understanding of work and recognize the potential benefits of play in enhancing our productivity and creativity? In this episode, BoredLess Founder Acey Holmes joins us to bring the play to the table. Acey shares with us the importance of play, and how it can positively impact our personal and professional lives. By incorporating more play into our lives, we may be able to unlock new levels of innovation, fulfillment, and joy. Whether you are a busy professional or an individual seeking greater fulfillment and joy, this episode has something to offer you. Tune in to learn more. --- Listen to the podcast here: The Surprising Power of Play with Acey Holmes Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a topic that we have yet to cover on the first 82 episodes of this particular podcast series and that is play because a lot of times we’re talking about personal improvement, how do we get better, how do we achieve the life that we want, but there are other essential human needs and I’ve talked a lot about community, I’ve talked a lot about mental health, and one key component of that actually is play and so my guest today, Acey Holmes, the founder of BoredLess, is bringing play to all of our workplaces and all of our lives. --- Acey, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me, Stephen. Thank you. So, Acey, what inspired you to make play your pursuit? So, during the pandemic, doesn’t every story these days start that way? Lately, yeah. Yeah. I was the clinical full-time practicing pediatric speech language pathologist and, of course, schools and therapy, everything got shut down and after that happened for a while and then longer and longer, administrators and bureaucrats started talking about, “Oh, what are we gonna do to catch the children up?” and they were pitching longer school days and extra summer school and who needs breaks, etc., and so everyone in my field, and we all start digging up all of the research. No, absolutely, that’s the opposite of the answer. Lots of people doing really great work for that and making the point of play is how children will learn. As I was studying this and going through it and reading more and more and more research and realizing that I hadn’t really been learning myself for quite a while and I wasn’t that connected and engaged with my own work that I used to love and I was seeing that story happen with a lot of my friends and colleagues and family and wondered if any of that research about play and the wonders of play, the benefits of learning and growth and development would apply to adults and it does exponentially. So, decided to take the left turn away from kind of the pediatric world because there are definitely people out there already working to bring play to adults but not enough so I wanted to add to that pot. Now, who are the people that are already working to bring play to adults? Because I doubt that many people have actually heard of it, given what adults are encouraged to do on a day-to-day basis in the modern world? Yeah, absolutely. Consultants, global international consultants, they all kind of have their own niche topic but it’s all based around play so Mike Montague, Gary Weir, Dr. Mike Rucker just released a book called The Fun Habit. Jeff Harry, a lot of folks are working in the realm of helping parents understand play and how they can benefit themselves as well as their children, like Laura Haver and Sharon Calderon. We’re kind of all over the place. And then even in Denver, we have --- so we are both in the Denver area so even in Denver locally to us, Stephen, there are some folks doing even like personal coaching for play. So Ashley DePaulis does work with individuals to help them bring more play to their lives. Janet Olmstead is one that focuses on like revisiting exercise as play and how that can benefit you. Oh, yeah. She’s like in Canada, though. She’s not in Denver, she’s in Canada, but, yeah, so --- and that list is not comprehensive. Yeah. So there are a lot of people out there talking about adults needing to play as well but the average adult right now probably is never encouraged to play at all. How do you think we got there? How do you think we got to the point where we have this mindset culturally that when you hit 15, 18, there’s a certain age where you’re expected to just no longer want to play and only want to do things that are work or an alternate form of work, such as measuring how many calories you ate and how many calories you burned, right? Yeah. So it actually started way back when we moved from hunter-gatherer communities into farming communities. So hunter-gatherers, the anthropological research tells us they spent up to 50 percent of their daily hours in leisure activities. Oh, wow. Even adults? Yeah, the whole community across the board. So, if they were out hunting bison, I don’t know, whatever it is that they’re hunting, it gets a little hot or they’re just not having that great luck, they would sit down and go fishing instead and not like fishing, “Oh, we need this to eat,” but like just for fun, or sit under some trees with the rest of the hunters and just either rest or play, which fascinated me because I always thought hunter-gatherers were probably just running from lions 24/7. When we switched into that whole farming community, things had to be done at certain times, seasons of the year and times of the day so now you have tasks that are scheduled. So that was the beginning of the downfall and, obviously, I’m not saying that that move from hunter-gatherer communities is all terrible but it’s where we started to lose play. Then we went into the Industrial Revolution, which everyone knows what that did to us. Now we’re in this lovely digital revolution where we are just overburdened with information at us all the time telling us that we should, should, should be doing something else other than play. Yes, and also something else other than what we want to be doing and what our natural gut instinct would tell us is right and so when we transitioned from hunter-gatherer to agriculture, did we stop playing altogether as adults or was there still a little bit of time --- I come from Long Island, I have always lived in cities so I know I’m very divorced from this world but my ideas come from the Weird Al Yankovic song, Amish Paradise, and one of the lyrics in that is, “At 4:30 in the morning, I’m milking cows.” Now, I imagine that between milking cows and whatever afternoon activity to be done, there’s going to be some in-between time where people would have spare time. Did people ever play as adults during that or did people instantly transition to like a non-playing lifestyle where it’s like once you’re 18, you’re done? I don’t know as much about the farming community societies, specifically, but now you’ve opened a rabbit hole for me to dive into very soon so thank you for that. Many of our societies, as adults, a lot of us are playing and we don’t realize it. Oh, wow. Okay. Fairly often. So I think there was very likely because, again, especially back then before, with the farming communities before standardized and structured school, the children were still at home learning to be adults through playing, imitating what their parents were doing. Generally, there probably was play at that point. And then probably more so the fall off in that Industrial Revolution era, when it was 12-, 14-hour days, six and seven days a week was probably the more drastic drop. Yeah. Nowadays, it feels like everything in life is really structured, like even I’m going to get a workout in isn’t I’m just going to walk around the forest, it’s I’m going to map this hike, I’m going to get out my Strava app and I’m going to measure myself against other people. Is this all kind of a fallout from the Industrial Revolution or are there other sociological factors that kind of led us to where it can feel almost suffocating where every single minute of one’s life is a task to be mastered or something that’s planned out? I mean, it’s a huge sociological phenomenon and problem. It’s the shoulds, the hustle culture, the grind culture. If you’re not doing and if you’re not showing, then you’re absolutely wasting time. Our society just has really dug deep into that and I know your work and a lot of us are really trying to get away from it but it’s hard. It’s an uphill battle because it’s been so deeply ingrained that it’s do and produce and show.Share on X And it’s hard to even get out of that mindset because, you know, I’ve had plenty to say about our education system and how it’s set up right now but it ingrains this idea of wait for someone to give you a task, do it to the best of your ability then wait to be judged on it. Exactly, which is atrocious. Yeah, so 17 years of that, it’s hard to --- that conditioning, the conditioning in your subconscious really kind of --- it’s hard to really break. And then for a long time, even the educators with the best intentions and leaders trying to do the right things, we were being told that brain development, especially in our prefrontal cortex, which is where executive functioning is, where we make critical thinking and problem solving, clinically, science was telling us that the brain stopped developing around the age of 25. In your mid-20s, that was it, good luck, this is the type of adult you are, this is the type of leader you are. If it’s not great,...