Welcome to Play and Flow! When is the last time you were in a state of FLOW? Can you remember a recent time you experienced PLAY ?
My aim in this blog is to offer you a chance to reflect on the ways you have connected with your own “play” and “flow,” perhaps while you were watching children playing or engaged in a creative pursuit. And if you’re stuck, perhaps this blog will help you unstick, and begin to flow a little!
Let me start by framing these two terms, play and flow. In the posts I nod toward ways play is invoked for different uses. This blog looks at whether the use of play is big ‘P’ play, In a word, Play. Throughout the site I’ll ask you a series of questions to spur you to reflect or access the places in your life when you were in a state of Play or Flow. Once you know this, it’s a lot easier to recreate kinds of play that bring you into that heightened state of relaxed and focused concentration.
In this short introduction, I’ll be drawing on widely available framing to introduce my two current core terms, play and flow. We’ll turn to play in a moment, look at some helpful lists at the end, and consider what Play is today. Let’s look at Flow.
The Concept of Flow
Flow is a term that emerged out of Mihalyi Csiksgentmihalyi’s now famous research into satisfaction and happiness. He offered a description of a peak or core component of his Flow concept, detailing a heightened state of relaxed though focused concentration in which skills rise to match challenges effortlessly, yet in an appropriate and essential way. His original concept has become popularized, often presented as the point on a continuum at which a challenge and one’s skill meet favorably, in a kind of body-mind-environment nexus. Workplace and self improvement models have built upon this or a very similar structure, of passing through a realm of difficulty into a heightened more able state.
When Does Flow Happen
When our skills and abilities aren’t at a level sufficient to meet a challenge, we can feel anxiety; our minds may grapple with details, then, as our thoughts become distracted they obscure our perspective. If the challenge is too low, boredom approaches, and again our mental activity engages that excess capacity by seeking stimulation or ease, to engender a distracted, fragmented quality, or split focus.
What Flow Feels Like
At a perfect intersection, when practice of a skill has an effortless quality, flow’s pleasure or quality of enjoyment emerges. We’re engaged in a dynamic rather than static state. The mind’s attention has a relaxed ready focus that is unselfconscious: we’re aware, involved, have an integrated focus and intention, we modulate our skills to match the changes and shifts in our challenge. Flow experts place this state as at the upper limit of our abilities, where an opportunity of jumping up to the next level lives.
Play and state change
For Play advocates in education or training, flow and play dwell in an area, that correctly primed, can catalyze state-change: we’re at the tip of our ability, and with the right (or magic) touch we expand out of the container of our present state, and improve. The academic term “Zone of Proximal Development” says this threshold morphs in a number of ways, catalyzed by an outside agent. That growth can be a change, an improvement, or an expansion.
Self-conscious and Unself-conscious Engagement: Flow and Children’s Play
Children’s developmental play treads along these borders of unselfconscious engagement. They acquire or develop skills to meet challenges, repeating the mental requirements of will and focus, movement, and later, social interaction. It’s a constant upward seeking journey rehearsed consciously, ’til it can be done at will unselfconsciously.
Separating play’s definition from childhood associations lets us unpack and leverage play’s qualities using a quality of will, that of self observation. Once we’ve begun developing the higher executive function of adulthood, we can use our minds to notice play’s immersive quality, and begin to cultivate intention. We can participate in our growing within our play. And, in leadership roles, we can fine tune play or flow levels.
Conscious Play
Intention is one of the boundaries at which play morphs. One leaves behind play activity when one returns to “the task at hand” or when we “get real”. To be play, a play activity by social consensus happens in a parallel dimension alongside everyday “real” life. Hey! For Play advocates, Play has become a destination to revisit, making our earlier and current selves visible, even “alternate” or “parallel”!
The big idea, big ‘P’ Play found in adventure training and education rests on concepts developed in the fields of psychology, insights and concepts into human development stages. But our developmental needs alone, driven by genes and environment, don’t qualify what Play is. So is it fair to make claims for Play that borrow from genres of human knowledge not accessible to us in our earliest developmental stages? I look at Play as mining the value of a safe social space, emphasis on social, and as a reactivation of early learning modes, possibly ones that are important for preceding the high executive function’s development that continues into our late twenties.
This blog addresses my burgeoning experiential Play inquiry. Play skirts recreation and civic program leadership ideas (challenge equals growth), and education’s struggle to hold on to the “child” in child education vs marinating little adult superachiever’s in scheduled and serial hyper-enriching immersive training. Coaching and team building rely on Play’s parallel dimension and no-consequences nature to prepare subjects to learn with less duress: play with external motivation or not “for real”. My recent experience showed me experientially that experienced Play leaders work in a crafted and sophisticated environment geared to place experiential learning next to cognitive reflection, by activating Play’s earlier engaged problem solving’s intrinsic nature. What separates Play from motivational training, trust games, and recreation and adventure’s character building dimensions? The core difference for me today is Play’s attention to reactivating older states of learning in adults who’ve developed higher executive function, and a particular way of inhabiting Play’s alternate social arena of safety, trust, volition and exploration.
What is a favorite play memory for you? Does it seem to have an element of the “flow” mentioned above, a momentary timeless engagement with whatever you were doing? How about a sense of a challenge facing you being necessary for you to solve, in the way your initial reading attempts, tree climbing, conscious pre adolescent social efforts, perhaps a fascination with a rhythm, structure or early piece of code, building a structure on a sandy beach. Can you articulate what is different about that Play and the new formal social forms of Play emerging around us?
Thanks for reading. Flow has been around for a bit. This simple and helpful site includes some of the main and most common observations newcomers will encounter:
http://www.globoforce.com/gfblog/2013/happiness-flow-and-how-to-be-a-better-leader/
Though we know what play is generally, specific instances of play focus personal and group experience, to bring to light aspects of the natural and social world of human behavior, adaptation, and interaction.
The UK’s Literacy Trust offers these ideas for play. Look them over and see if they still apply to your sense of and interest in Play. Once you’ve finished, here’s my take.
1. Play lays the foundation for literacy. Through play children learn to make and practise new sounds. They try out new vocabulary, on their own or with friends, and exercise their imagination through storytelling.
2. Play is learning. Play nurtures development and fulfils a baby’s inborn need to learn. Play takes many forms, from shaking a rattle to peek-a-boo to hide-and-seek. Play can be done by a child alone, with another child, in a group or with an adult.
3. Play encourages adults to communicate with the children in their lives. Adults support play by giving children the opportunity to engage in play, by knowing when not to intervene, and by knowing when to intervene.
4. Play gives children the chance to be spontaneous. You may think your child should be rolling the truck on the ground but that doesn’t mean that truck is not equally useful as a stacking toy.
5. Play gives children choice. Having enough toys or activities to choose from will allow children to express themselves.
6. Play gives children space. To practise physical movement, balance and to test their own limits.
7. Play gives adults the chance to learn how to play again. One of the most challenging parts of play is incorporating yourself in it.
8. Play allows adults to learn their child’s body language. Knowing when you should incorporate yourself in your child’s play is key.
9. Play teaches adults patience and understanding. If you do choose to join in your child’s play make sure that you do not try to take it over and force incorporation of your ultimate learning objectives into their play. Structured adult-led activities have their time and place but remember to allow for time for children to control and decide their own play.
10. Play is fun. Learning to play well, both by themselves and with others, sets children up to be contented and sociable.
More frames through which to view Play can be found here at the Museum of Play’s link page .
thanks to paco, the digital cowboy at: 
Exploring the Sphere of Play 