Playing
Posted on June 13, 2012 by Linda Deming Ratcliff, One of Thousands of Family Coaches on Noomii.
Why play is important at any age.
I love to play. I don’t mean card or board games. I don’t mean games like tennis although it is fun, but really playing. Remember recess in elementary school? What did you do? The most fun thing for me was swinging and playing tag. Now that’s what I call play. We forget to play as we grow up and it is only when we have a small child or a puppy that play comes back into our lives. One of the things that made our early play fun was lack of competition. We just played. No one really cared who won. The winner in tag was quickly forgotten and it just didn’t matter. After we played, we felt a connection with our playmates. We enjoyed them in play although we didn’t in the classroom because they were smart or stupid or in the other reading group. Outside, while playing, the lines of discrimination fell and he was just another kid on the swing set.
We had a wonderful science teacher. We learned so much from her and she is the teacher that we remember decades later. Why was she so valuable to us? She taught a lot of lessons by playing. We made candles. We learned about what temperature does to candle wax. We learned about molecules and that when the wax got hot, the molecules moved more and there was space between them and that space made it a liquid. We all took home our candles, so proud of them. And, we had a deep understanding of molecules at age 6.
As adults, playing is thought of as something we’ve outgrown. Jesus understood play. He taught some of His most important lessons in parables, stories. Direct teaching would have lost the crowd. Parables were a playful way of getting His point across.
I use play in life coaching. Although we don’t play tag, we do laugh and tease sometimes. That sort of conversation allows an adult to hear easier because it is playful. Think about how you would like to be coached. Would you want the direct, “Oh, come on, get a grip.” or the jocular, “Oh, goodness, I wonder how else you could have handle it? Let’s see, you could have stepped on his foot and just run away!”
When dealing with life coaching it is important for both parties to have mutual respect for each other. This is fine, but it can get mundane. A simple thinking out of the box, brainstorming can add a lot of play to coaching. I prefer coming up with a few silly examples of how to do something as a way of lightening a hard situation. Play is important throughout life and in coaching it is a very valuable tool.
