Unlocking Human Potential: The Power of Play

sort of a thing. It was in twenty ten, two thousand and nine. So yeah, I came to Tazzy. I did a working holiday visa for a year in Melbourne and then figured out a sneaky way to get myself here for good.

am I doing here? Who am I? And I ended up having a coach who I did some great work with, just kind of landing and who I wanted to be in this new space. And he one day said to me, you should be a coach. You really, you really get this stuff. And I said, okay, sure. I was kind of done with I was kind of done with PR and marketing, so I went and got my coaching certification.

I set up a successful coaching business. I worked outside of different wellness centers, and then I just was getting this itch of the one on one thing for me. I'm super extroverted and I always wanted to be an actress when I was a kid. So I was like, this is this work is rewarding, but I want to like reach more people. I want to kind of have a little bit of a stage. So I started crafting

workshops that were about mental health and well being. But I would bring a character in or I would dress up as like, you know, how to tame I would do how to Tame your inner critic, and I would dress up as a lion tamer just to create a little bit more kind of levity and lightness around heavier topics.

And then yeah, I started to just kind of delve more into more in this idea of play, and I tried to run Australia's first ever adult summer camp, which was unfortunately the first of my business and quite a flop. I had, I think three people three people book. But then I really was trying to get to my core. I was doing my Simon sink Why and I was like, all right, I really want to connect adults to their playfulness.

And I had a friend say, oh, why don't you look at doing it from a personal sorry from a professional perspective then personal, So I kind of pivoted from play for personal into play for professional did a real big deep dive around what was happening in Silicon Valley and things like that, and then started iterating on that, and that was This year is my tenth year in really diving into this world of play at work and all of the benefits that it creates around innovation, creativity,

psychological safety. I mean, the list goes on and on from mental health and well being. For me, play is such this incredible conduit with which we can enter into our full potential as human beings. And I think, you know,

we can talk more about that in a bit. I want to give Tana a chance to give his origin story, But yeah, I think you know, play is a real opportunity to unlock so much of our own internal b allions, which is very much buried under achievement, success, mortgages, responsibility, conformity, risk, aversion. So yeah, I think there's a lot to be said about how do we sort of excavate that part of ourselves to arrive in this kind of crazy time of

technological change and disruption.

You can fight around me and not shower and I am unaware. But on this whale dissection, I really love marine biology and I wanted to be a marine biologist. And this woman from Harvard Medical School, Darling Kenton, who was leading the dissection which I got to help with, told me this marine biology is a saturated field, but if you can understand the code of life itself DNA, you can apply it to any field within biology. So

that's out with me for a while. And landed in New Zealand and first started house painting because I was broke as and then got a job doing how hospitalities founded up, managing wineries and making wine on Wayhiki and

New Zealand. And then my brain was atrophying, and because I'm a nerd, I went back to academia and I went to the University of Melbourne for bioinformatics, basically using AI machine learning to read DNA and figure out what genetic changes are causing cancer and working with clinicians to improve patient outcomes. So my PhD research was at Peter McCollum Cancer Center and during this time I love science, I love technology, but I think it lacks good communication.

So formed a company called future Crunch, which is science communication explores the frontiers of science and technology and really seeks out stories of human progress, stories of incredible people around the world doing great stuff to make the world a better place, because I think one people really suffer from is negative information, a torrent of negative news, and that doesn't lead to pathways forward and a belief that

lotions are available. So that for the last thirteen years have been working with organizations and individuals to help foster intelligent optimism with the Reverend Humor and fancy colorful jackets on stage, so that's pretty much me and ended up in Melbourne, Love Australia and ran across Darra and a plain nerd and a science tech nerd collided and we now work together in a more I would say human holistic approach. So we're both nerds from different angles.

what what what are you guys seeing out there? I mean, you're you're at the cold face, you're interrupted and interacting

with with companies.

with a company, you have no job security. The amount of redundancies and transformations and restructuring that are happening is just causing people so much distress. And so I think, you know, one thing that isn't necessarily explicit in the book, but what is basically the general gist of what we're trying to talk about is really looking at conditions. Because I think when we explore burnout from a systemic perspective,

it feels very big. And so when we talk about how burnout costs businesses trillions of dollars, how does a leader actually really see themselves in those numbers, and how do we kind of bring it down to a more granular level for what they can relate to and see in their people and what's happening. And so when you think about the conditions, it's actually, you know, a smaller

subset of what the systemic issue is around work. I mean, when you think about the industrial revolution and even the in work ethic around play being sorry by work being salvation and things like that, that's like five hundred years of unprogramming that we need to do around how we identify it with work and success and achievement. Right, But that's so big, and when we try and approach something that's so big, we become paralyzed and we do nothing.

So for us, especially with the way that we've written the book, is really about creating sort of micropractices and micro moments around changing the conditions both in the environments that we have control over in our own lives and also giving leaders the opportunity to think about changing the conditions within their realm of and sphere of influence.

But what we discovered in researching what kind of is like the presupposition of burnout is something called achievement syndrome, which comes from an amazing researcher based in the States called Michael Simmons, which is really the slow and steady

kind of slide towards burnout. And it really happens from the moment when we're children and we start to achieve, So we get ribbons and trophies and report cards and stars and stickers, and you know, we're really awarded for Yeah, exactly correct, and so that starts to feel good and we really like that, and then that takes us into our kind of identity fusion where we're starting to connect to success as like who we are, you know, it's like I am my achievements, and so we start to

lose our sense of self and really the kind of passion that started us off when we were younger and really hungry to learn and grow starts to diminish because we become so engulfed in this concept of promotion and recognition and validation and all those sorts of things. Then we kind of get into this optimization.

This is a term from the military from my kind of background, a word of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

your report cards, you're be impressive and you belong. And as we grow and move into the workplace, we really get this identity fusion where we become our output performance in our person It becomes indistinguishable, which leads us into this, especially with AI as a layer over everything in the world in which we live, work and play, we sort of have to enjoy. We get to this thing where

we start scheduling joy morning routines get hacked. We look at a bunch of productivity poor and so every moment is optimized.

of this achievement syndrome. Because this achievement syndrome, it doesn't just hijack our thinking. At hijacks are breathing. We have shallow breathing. It activates our nervous system. We sort of lose present moment awareness. Cortisol is flooding our system. Our jaws locked shoulders live in permanent tension. Our head feels

like a balloon on a string. And yeah, and I think with your information overload as well, going back to what darre was talking about with conditions, conditions are really the soil, and I think that's where a lot of our apathy, fear, and burnout comes from and our disconnection. So think of conditions like it's a relationship ecosystem with our family, friends, and our organizational culture. It's our information

diet where we have a torrent of fake news. You need to do more of course, with negativity, bias and the media system that's predicated on fear and interrational perception of risk to get our attention. Nervous systems really overload and which reduces We have a triple C conditions, capacity and capability. But this reduces our capacity, which is essentially the bandwidth and what's growing from the conditions, the conditional soil and our base, our foundations, and so capacity is

not necessarily a skill that your bandwidth. It's the underlying resource that makes really everything else possible, and it's dynamic, contextual, and it's deeply conditionally dependent. And then what we have is called capability, and those are skills that we can develop, exercise, and it's what happens when latent human capacity gets enough of the right conditions, the enough practice to become to thrive, become reliable and accessible under pressure. And once you form

strong capabilities, they feedback into your capacity. Your bandwidth and capacity increases. For example, a person who develops curiosity is a capacity. Our capability and their capacity increase. They start treating novelty new things as novelty and exciting rather than threatening.

The energization increases and it increases their capacity. A person who's developed hope, for example, strategic cope as a capability, finds obstacles that used to be difficult to navigate and depleteting are far easier to get around and deal with, and developed capacity starts to change fundamentally the conditions around them. So, for example, good leaders, once they build capacity and good capability, they actually start creating better conditions around them for their ecosystem.

And that's one that's our three c's that really get to the point of if any of these go offline, you lead to burnout, achievement syndrome, and chronic stress because in the modern day workforce, it's always high stakes. There's always you know, fear of failure and risk aversion. And I think that's a lot of what we're suffering despite AI coming to steal your jobs and the information overload.

and so it's actually not really a useful tone.

Then my frontal lobes aren't working so well. I can't regulate my emotions as well. I can't also my self controlled hearts of the bri in become diminished, so I'm more likely to eat ship food drink alcohol to soothe my stress.

our own or find a different company, so that we're not necessarily rendered choiceless. But again not trying to be a Pollyanna like we are. You know, interest rates are up again, like you know, the cost of living is insane, So it doesn't doesn't we don't necessarily have this opportunity to go I don't like my job, I'm just going to find a new one, Like the job market is

just so volatile at the moment. So I think what we can start to understand and recognize in creating agency for ourselves is what are the conditions we are creating for our personal life relationally? What are our conditions? Are we seeking out connection? Are we are we catching up with friends? Are we seeing a therapist?

like vitamin C, vitamin connect. There's plenty of data. There's plenty of data out there around blue zones and things like that around you know, how do people centennials live past one hundred because of their community?

his jam. But from again conditions perspective, what is the information that we are ingesting over to utane?

be like taking in information that actually nourishes you. So choose your narrative nash that really is evidence based. It gives you an active view on the world around you. It's not toxic positivity. And I think it leads to something that we call intelligent optimism, which is it's evident spaceed, it's an accurate positive projection. It's a difference between cynical people like what's wrong with this people in this process, and an accurate assessment where are the people actually doing

something different providing solutions. And I think if people really did an audit of their information diet and properly curate it, they would find out that there are lots of solutions. There's power reduction, clean energy trajectories, better ways of doing stuff in the twenty first century that we can all get involved with as opposed to just netflixing and chilling or going down a YouTube rabbit hole watching cat videos.

those kind of good feel stories. It's about actively thinking about what information is going to serve you, and especially when it comes to negative news. A lot of people and you know, look at well we're from Darren and I from the US. If you look at US politics, everyone's freaking out about it. But what are people actually doing about it?

the negativity with solution based thinking and information. Really checking your facts and understanding if you're getting a piece of information, where's it coming from and what was the intention of that information in the first place.

focusing on what I can control. Do you think there's a role here in that information diet that it should include a bit of philosophy.

that it diminishes our capacity for curiosity. And when we lose our ability to be curious and to ask our own questions and to seek out our own answers, then we are really missing out on this ability to like stretch ourselves and become uncomfortable and just like have that sense of wonder and awe and and and playfulness with the world. And you know, to be to be or not to be? That is the question, right because it

because it's not answerable. And I think when we like we're so in need of certainty in this uncertain world that being able to incorporate some philosophy into your life or even pontificating, you know, existentially on your on your own life of you know, what does it all mean? Not from a doomsday perspective, but just from like a you know, what can I get out of this experience? I'm here, I'm only here for a short time. What

am I going to do with this life? And and how am I gonna feel joy and feel connection and have gratitude and and be thankful? And a lot of that stems from curiosity. And there's a really amazing thinker that we interviewed in our book, David Pearl, who is very much a curiosity expert. And there's this real interesting delineation between interest and curiosity because interest has this sense of I'm trying to find something out or I'm kind of judging it a little bit. What is it? What

is it? You know, how does it relate to what I need or or what my thinking is, whereas curiosity is is this exploration. There is no sort of ego involved, there's no judgment involved. It's just curiosity for curiosity's sake. And so, you know, you could go to a party and be chatting to a bunch of random people and you're like, oh, no, none of these people are very interesting, and it's like, well, you can be curious about uninterest. You can be curious about uninteresting things, just you can.

or is it going to kill us? Who the hell knows, But just being able to be in that space of kind of holding two truths at once and having that dialectical thinking and being able to say, like going back to what tan I was saying about intelligent optimism, like yes, things are fucked and they're getting better, and there's there's there's possible solutions out there that people are doing and

then are getting their their hands dirty. So I think philosophy has a has a great place and helping us expand our minds and our thinking and our perspection, perception.

that has existed within us. And so when we seek out pleasure all the time, there is an inevitability that we will feel pain, we will crush, we will one hundred because our body needs to maintain homeostasis, and because pain and pleasure are on the same tract within our

biology and our neurology. And so that's why things like high intensity interval training or trying something you've never tried before that's hard, or doing ice baths or its cold showers or whatever, you're forcing our body into a pain state to then be able to tip you into a pleasure state. And so when we're constantly dopamine seeking this short pleasure that we feel and again, it's we are victims of our conditions because we know so much about

the way that our brain works. Now, so there's marketers and neuroscientists and behavioral experts that are just playing on our that are just playing on our biology and our wiring to maximize their capacity to sell to us and

to influence us. And so it's grabbing our attention because it is there is the perfect equation has been unleashed around how do we get people to do the shit we want them to do through X, Y and Z. And so I think when people understand more about dopamine and pain and pleasure and how much we need to find balance in our lives between those two things, because, like you said before, this level of comfortability that we're

feeling is essentially killing us. It is this intense paradox that we exist in as human beings where we are the most comfortable and most uncomfortable that we have ever been. And that is also that's philosophy. Right to be comfortable or to not to be comfortable? That is the question.

So that's why his brain gives them the reward are doing hard stuff, because it's like, you need to do this shit again otherwise we're going to die.

can continue happening even past finishing the manuscript. And so what we're realizing, going back to this conversation around conditions, capacity and capability, You are higher in an organization because of your capability, because you have the skills, the mindsets, the behaviors that are qualify you for a particular role. Right, then we enter these environments or these conditions that do

not sort of elevate or or or grow this or amplify. Yeah, so then we're basically suppressing, right where if you imagine capacity as a cup, right, and your cup starts quite big, ready to go, You've got your new job, it's awesome. But then as things chip away, everything is high stakes. That's another thing that we talk about, is like everything is a high stakes environment. Everything is so important, everything is urgent, and again that's how that's how your nervous

system responds you. You are in fight or flight mode. You have amygdala hijack. You're constantly in stress. When we're stressed, we can't be curious, we can't have all, we can't have wonder, we can't be playful. It just doesn't Our brain is not great. And because we've created this false sense of safety with an organization where safety feels like risk, aversion and conformity and certainty, right like, that's like what we sort of secretly identify is safe within an organization.

Let's not do the crazy thing where we're thinking of a million ideas and you know, we need there's there's compliance, and all these things that are supposed to keep things tidy, you know, are the very things that are depleting everyone's capacity and therefore their capability. So then we create these conditions which are suppressing everyone's capability, right because the capabilities don't disappear, they don't just like evaporate, they're just suppressed, constrained, suppressed,

put like. And so then we spend shitloads of money on training so that we can bring people's capability back, but we don't actually change the conditions, so we're not only suppressing capability. Then we're wasting a shit ton of money trying to re reskill them and something they are likely already probably very good at, but it doesn't exist at the moment because it's so suppressed. It becomes this gross self fulfilling prophecy and a total waste of time

and money. It's like, forget about trying to you know, upskill people. Just you hired them for a reason. Give them the conditions enable them, like let the human potential be seen and felt and not just going, oh, like, this is a people problem. People are disengaged and they're burnt out, and what do we have to teach them how to? I sat on my volume controller, so I was like, what's going on? Sorry about that? But yeah, so then you know, we need to give them resilience training,

and we need to give them mental health training. And it's just like, wait a minute, pause, what are the conditions that you are creating? And that again is very much on the onus of a leader around how do you regulate your own nervous system, right, because as soon as you enter a room, people are going to be mirroring and feeling whatever you are bringing in. So from your coming in and from a sympathetic perspective. People are going to be catch picking up on that, and that

doesn't breed safety. So it's like, let's stop trying to throw a million dollars of money down the toilet, are on training and actually think about what are the conditions we are creating for people to be able to thrive within a business context.

around improving conditions capacity capability?

don't really build anything back or change the conditions. So I think that's one way to start thinking about it. I think we talk about serious play, radical curiosity, strategic hope, intelligent optimism, and embedded adaptability. Is capabilities depending on your capacity that really can help you thrive and play in curiosity are some of the most basic, the easiest capabilities to come back online. You can set the conditions for play,

especially in a work to place environment, quite easily. It's low stakes risk experiments without any you're playing around, and you can do this in a serious way because play is not a child just left over. Its fundamental part of our emotional system, and it's in pretty much all mammals as well.

Like when you think about aviation, for example, pilots are constantly using VR and simulation to learn how to fly a plane because you don't just throw them into a high stakes environment and put them in a plane with people on it. Jump.

more complex. But before every flight, we had simulator flights where the instructor would throw in little curveballs for you to deal with and then stop it and talk you through it, so that you learned in the simulator and you develop that capacity that you could then use in

the real world. Right, Sorry, I just wanted to throw that in because that is a fundamental part of that training, is that progressive overload to the simulation, make mistakes in the simulator so that you then increase your capacity in the real world.

it's a negative feedback loop. It's like I try, I just try to do this thing and it didn't work and I'm incompetent, and then it just this this is

self perpetuating thing. And so, you know, from a play perspective, like I've been bringing play into workplaces for the last ten years, and there's so much education that's required because we've learned that play is childish, that it's frivolous, that it's a distraction, that it's a ping pong table in the corner, or a beanbag or two next to a whiteboard, when that's not creating conditions like when we when when

we think about it, it's it's a it's a permission piece. Right, So not only do we as individuals have to give ourselves permission to play and see it not as as a frivolity in our lives, because again, when we talk about burnout and achievement syndrome, so much of that is I have so much to do all the time, I couldn't possibly do something fun. I just don't have time for it, you know what I mean. And so we have to find that capacity for permission in ourselves to

be able to play. But then from a leadership perspective and a culture perspective, there needs to be this opening of like, yes, you can test something, and you can try something, and you can and you can fail because there's a different aspects of failure. There's intelligent failure where it's actually moving towards innovation, moving towards trying new things.

And so when we don't allow this this kind of play space in an organization, which is very much a mindset, it's not necessarily like again bean bags and slippant like slides in the lobby or whatever it is. It's it's cultivating this sense of you can ask card questions and you can test this thing, and you can try something and not get it automatically, and creating these kind of micropractices within organizations where then like a muscle, it's built.

And like you were talking about before with the way you were flying helicopters, it's like we grow this level of confidence and competence by having those low stakes opportunities. That way, when things are big, we know we can do it. And so I think this concept of play is so fundamental to the way that we learn, it creates new neural pathways in our brain. It releases dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin,

and endorphins. So when it comes to hijacked amygdala's when it comes to overwhelmed, when it comes to fight or flight, the fastest way to bring our nervous system back online is through some sort of playful intervention. And that might just be having a lighthearted conversation. It might be listening to a song. It might be sometimes I talk about even just making a fart noise with your mouth, like as a way to just break this, just break your state, you know what I mean. It's just like just a

way to just stop the noise. And so like thinking back to what brought you joy as a child and using that as a kind of compass to find things for you to connect within your adult life. And obviously the way we engage in play is different as children, as we do as adults, but as also as adults, we become these passive consumers of play. It's like I want to sit back and be entertained, and there's no sense of involvement or participation or engagement.

they're thinking, right, and so they overtalk. But one thing I do with teams is just if somebody's going to have a word like jelly fish, we just go jellyfish and then it's like, yeah, you're talking, but it's a nice way of going, Hey, can we just bring this back on to the topic, right, So throwing in some of those little things, Yeah, absolutely.

to write down.

interesting one. I like Charles Snyder Hope's theory. So really to develop hope, it's not naive hope and just be like, oh, I believe.

accessible learned. Helplessness really demonstrates that repeated experiences of uncontrollability Welcome to the world in twenty twenty six can really permanently suppress both of those. So it's a nervous system that we really need to get back online. We call hope as a verb, not a hashtag. Hope is built, it's not found. And I think intelligent optimism is another one. It's the most counter evolutionary capability of the five. Our default wiring really runs against it. We got negativity bias

which really kept our ancestors alive. I mean, the Savannah didn't reward optimists. It ate so cultivating intelligent optimism, it's not returning to a natural state. It's really a cognitive achievement that runs against evolved defaults, and I think it can really help the right conditions and back to I think in a way to tune your infermation diet to foster your own intelligent optimism. I think long form reading that sustained dopamine hits as opposed to the most information

out there is junk food. The equivalent of corn syrup and jelly babies, because it's that short spike and the quick crash. So we need solid, wholesome logallycemic index, information and knowledge and solutions that really can feed us and keep that those good chemicals flowing. Yeah, because I think we need hope and intelligent optimism to really break out of this overwhelmed, burnt out and high stakes environment.

of the clusterfuck that we find ourselves in. So philosophy has its place. But my one of my favorite teachers, the philosophy teacher, said, you studied philosophy for twenty years and the only thing you learned to do was just.

of evolutionary hangovers. That is something that we deep dive into the book or from a science communication perspective, under standing the way that our brain works. We make a joke like have brunch with your brain, take your take your mind out for a meal. Like, the more we can understand the way our brain like is actually wired, the more we can work with it instead of against it. And so you know, this playful assumption awareness is like

have a play with what you're assuming, you know. And and again, cultivating that sense of curiosity means that you're kind of questioning things of the things that you believe. And it's like that early programming piece that we talked about in achievement syndrome. It's like, are the things that I believe in actually mine? Do I?

else can I be doing? And kind of taking those that kind of playful assumption awareness and then flipping it on its head and saying, well, what if this assumption wasn't true? What would be different for me?

ones that you should poke the strongest stright, because often these things come from our childooes. But if you've had adverse childhood experiences, you have assumptions, beliefs, patterns, behaviors that may have served you well as a caged to protect you, that are now fucking your life up.

or looking competent, but I also want to like learn things and grow and evolve. And so when we have this internal tension, and that's why change is so difficult, because it really pushes up against our identity. It pushes up against this internal framing of I need to be safe and this change like it's uncertain and I don't know what to do, but I also really want to grow. And so it's not laziness when we try and change

something about ourselves. It's just because we're actually trying to put our foot on the gas and the break at the same time, and that doesn't work. And that's where this kind of assumption piece comes in. It's like, what are the behaviors that I'm doing or not doing that are stopping me from being this kind of better version of myself or more aware version of myself. What are my fears and worries that sit below those behaviors, and

then what am I assuming about everything around that? And like we talked about before flipping it on its head and just saying like, what if this wasn't true, what would I be doing differently? And again having and then setting yourself a small experiment. All right, well, if this wasn't true, I can go and give it a little ten, get that positive feedback, and then start to make those little micro changes. And that's how I think we can create a better way forward for ourselves, instead of going,

I need to change everything. My information diet is shit based on what Tane said, and I'm not, you know, like I'm not doing this enough and I'm doing that and just like berating ourselves instead of going just all right, let's get curious. Let's be a detective. What's going on here?