Visualize A training room full of suited and booted business people on a Monday morning, most of them dont know each other and are tired and jetlagged waiting expectantly to start their course.

Can you believe that 5 minutes later everyone is laughing, joking around and dancing? Amazing hey? Just how does that happen?

What I love doing is getting people to play, and this includes dancing and movement and creating a space for fun. And this generates JOY! Later I bump into the delegates along the corridor and they have a Pavlovian response to me so they dance past when they see me, smiling and making playful gestures at me, because wed been doing that in sessions and what I see is the inner children that they truly are joyfully greeting me AND I AM SO TOUCHED.

How does this change happen? The answer is play. Let us look at the Dictionary definitions…

PLAY: To take part in enjoyable activity for the sake of amusement, fun or jest, as opposed to seriousness.

WORK: The exertion of physical or mental effort directed to produce or accomplish something with labour and toil!

PLAY@WORK is a proposal that could dramatically change working culture as we know it today. To create a space for play every day. 5 minutes is all it takes. Play is for life not just for the occasional away-day team-building activity. So I advocate a daily practice of play.

What would happen if there was more play at work? Now theres a company that does just that and because of it, it has been repeatedly named Fortune Magazines No. 1 best place to work and most powerful brand in the world! Google! Google manifest that: Work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun. They have play areas and play time, Innovation Time Off where for 1 day a week (thats 20% of work time engineers get to investigate things that purely interest them. Their greatest innovations such as Gmail, Google News and AdSense are born PAUSE from this practice. So the bottom line is: 50% of new product launches originate from the 20% time. PLAY TIME.

How revolutionary is that?

So on the basis of this, it is my PASSION and JOY to facilitate Play@Work due to continuously witnessing the power of it. I mean, just imagine, a room full of people from all different backgrounds, languages and cultures sitting alone one minute and 5 minutes later behaving like good old friends having a party and bursting with joy. What happens? A phenomenon that I am thrilled by: to see how a disparate group instantly connects and gets on a much closer level. One of openness and trust. And you know what happens? The many veils of differences simply melt away.

Because we are NOT allowed to play@work I believe this does a lot to crush the human spirit which is naturally playful, spontaneous and curious childlike. Consider this; we are only officially allowed to play when we are little children. This s how we learn, through play, investigation, curiosity and spontaneity. And are discouraged from play we are even punished for playing when we are older, and could get fired for playing at work Therefore as adults, that precious flower that is the human spirit is stamped with a big muddy boot due not being allowed to play.

Over Xmas and New Year I have thrown many parties, and the fact that I have shared so much time together with my friends simply playing has generated great JOY for us all! We all felt connected because it was like being a happy family.

And of course, a family that plays together stays together.

And this wonderful feeling is transferable to a work situation because our colleagues are like our family. We spend more time with them than with our actual families. So there is a great need for a shared group experience that embodies fun BECAUSE when you release people through play they’re gonna feel freer and theyre gonna have brighter ideas and so clearly PERFORM BETTER. Play can actually be a valuable business asset. To do what you do with aliveness not labour. So Id like to encourage you play at work.

And see what happens hey?

In-Joy,

Maria Contreras

http://www.niamaria.com

play@niamaria.com

I wanted to share with you a little something about my favourite subject – JOY.

The first principle of Nia invites us to connect with the Joy of Movement. Joy is a sensation in Nia, as opposed to an emotion such as pleasure and happiness. When I am in Joy, I experience my body to be in a state of flow, of ease and of freedom. The sensation is pleasurable and so then the emotion also becomes joy-full. And if there is no joy, I tweak my movement until joy returns.

Why do I love Nia? Because it gets me out of my head and into my body. Why is this a good thing? Because that is where I can discover ways of experiencing and being in my body. As I continue to dance in this way – a conscious way, I heal my body and spirit.

In this video I share more about Joy and the role it plays in Nia… and in life.
Follow this link to hear more: NiaMaria – the Power of Play and Joy

In-Joy,
Maria