151. Make The World Your Playground Of Possibilities with Gary Ware
Expanding Your Capacity for Play
Many of us want to have the capacity to be more creative, to be better communicators, and to be able to tap into our empathy.
Improvisation can be a tool to broaden your capacity in all of these areas, giving you a playground to expand what you think is possible with a sense of levity and play.
Gary Ware and Erica discuss how to use improvisation skills to bring energy and joy to your work and to access your empathy and communication skills. For those who sometimes struggle to access that joyful energy, this conversation will inspire you to consider expanding past your doubts. And for those who approach life with a sense of energy and play, you’ll learn how to use your energy to deepen your capacity.
Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:
How improvisation and play helps you be present
How improv builds your empathy and communication skills
Why improv provides a container to safely release and work through difficult emotions
Why you need to give yourself permission to play
Improvisation and Play
Gary Ware, the Founder of Breakthrough Play, is a corporate facilitator, keynote speaker, certified coach, and self-proclaimed Creative Catalyst. Gary has over 14 years of experience in the corporate world holding various leadership positions. Being a multifaceted individual, Gary also comes with nearly a decade of experience as a performer in improv theatre. After experiencing burnout in his pursuit for success and happiness, he realized that what was missing was play. Committing to a life of play is what led Gary to discover his passion for facilitating.
Gary uses the power of applied improvisation and other playful methods to assist people in unlocking creativity, confidence, and better communication.
When Gary isn't leading workshops or speaking, you can find him learning magic or off on an adventure with his wife Courtney and son Garrett.
Getting Back to Recess
In its simplest definition, Gary Ware says on the Pause on the Play® podcast, improvisation is responding in the moment and making things up on the spot.
Gary’s background is in theatrical improv, where a group of actors co-create a scene from a suggestion, without a script. And in his decade-plus experience, “I realized that kids have these skills, you know, the ability to create divergently…and really expand on ideas, the ability to embrace mistakes.”
Because of that connection to play, the work that he does as a trainer and facilitator, he says, takes people back to recess.
“In its essence, it’s just all about responding in the moment in a way that is positive.”
Erica adds that it can be easy to think of improvisation as a skill that has to be acquired, “and sometimes there needs to be that unlearning of like, no…this is supposed to be fun.”
Gary agrees and tells his story of finding improv through a recommendation from a mentor. At the time, he also looked at it as a skill to acquire in pursuit of corporate success.
“I went to my first class and I was taken aback because for two hours we played these silly games…However, for two hours, I was completely immersed in the experience…I was completely present and I was having fun.”
Through that immersion and presence in the moment, Gary says his confidence increased and he was able to communicate better with his team at work.
“The fact that we allowed ourselves to play gave us the ability to connect.”
All too often, as adults, we “cut out those things that seem frivolous, that seem juvenile, and those are the things that are necessary for the connection to happen.”
Childlike Not Childish
Erica adds that when we think of things being childish or juvenile, “we are given this lie that we’re supposed to be adults, and being adults means that we don’t do certain things. And we’re the ones that are really getting it wrong.”
Gary agrees and parses out the difference between childish and childlike. “Childish is, you, know throwing a tantrum. And everything is sort of over-generalized and put into that bucket of childish and play is thrown in there.”
Being childlike, he says, is a set of traits that are actually highly desirable like curiosity, the ability to communicate, and wonder.
“Those are childlike qualities that we sort of turn off because…we’ve been conditioned to think that there’s only one right answer.”
He continues that in our uncertain world, where we don’t even have rules yet for the ways things are changing, “If you’re playing by the old rules, you’re going to end up burning yourself out because you’re not going to be effective because you’re not harnessing that childlike behavior.”
A Container for Release
Erica counters Gary’s equating childish behavior with throwing tantrums with insight into how in the right context and container, throwing a tantrum can help adults work through difficult emotions in a way that they maybe didn’t have access to as children.
Gary agrees with Erica’s point and elaborates that our culture often takes the edict to “control your emotions,” to unhealthy extremes.
When kids throw tantrums, it is an emotional release. As adults, we need that release too, but he says “I think we need to have a safe place to do that. And we also need to realize how we’re acting and how it potentially could affect other people.”
Erica says as a Black woman, it can be difficult to know when and where it’s actually safe to let go of feelings that had to be bottled up. “To be told, oh no, you can figure out how to let your emotions out. Then figuring out, well, which ones? And do you mean it? Are you sure? I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Improv, she continues, is an interesting concept as a space where, even momentarily, a person could “just be present in playing a role and having a level of honesty that you don’t feel like you have anywhere else, a level of transparency that you have a hard time being able to claim in other parts of life.”
Gary says that in theatrical improv, it’s difficult for your responses in scene to not be influenced by your life. “Yes, it’s all made up, but the inspiration comes from the experiences…The things that you experienced are going to show up in the work and it becomes therapeutic.”
Improv scenes can provide containers to work through situations and dynamics, “where we’re listening and we’re playing off of each other and then afterwards you’re like, ooh, man, that felt good. I got to release it.”
Because people of color don’t always have access to safe spaces to let these things out, he says, “for me, the stage has been a great place to sort of play through some of these things.”
He’s careful to remind students that there is a difference between the character you’re playing and the actor, but “because I’m able to separate from these things, this detachment allows me to just sort of release it and I can see it and play with it…There’s just this release that comes from doing it.”
Exercising Empathy
Gary says improv is also a container for deepening our capacity for empathy. As an example of how improv helps build that capacity, he describes a two-person game called Pro Con Speech where each player is tasked to rant and rave about a series of prompts.
The back and forth, “starts to exercise your empathy muscle, your ability to see things from someone else's point of view.”
He says he starts with prompts that people will feel mostly indifferent about, like a food they don’t have strong feelings about either way, but it can be a useful tool to bring into situations of contention.
“Doing this activity doesn’t mean that by you taking someone else’s stand that you have to stay there. It just gives you a space to explore it. You start to have empathy and then you might end up meeting in the middle.”
Erica can envision how this game could be successfully used both at work and at home. “I think anytime there’s a conversation that needs to be had that is challenging, finding a way to navigate it that isn’t quite so heavy or really coded in ‘somebody has to be wrong here’ is immensely helpful.”
Gary adds that improv also comes with a set of agreements between all of the actors that have come to influence his behavior off-stage as well. “We agree that this is how we’re going to behave…Improv can’t work unless we are all on the same page with this.”
A key agreement in improv is about always saying yes to what your scene partner offers and building on it. “The reason we do that is that we’re so conditioned to say no to everything.”
In off-stage life, we can’t say yes to everything, but it can be translated into “you accept, and you build. You accept that that is the reality…and how can we build on that?”
Erica adds that “the beauty of ‘yes, and’ is that it really puts you in this position that you don’t have to have personally gone through this or understand this or identify with it, but you’re holding space for possibilities outside of what you would have regularly considered a possibility to be.”
Permission to Play
While improv can be used as a tool to expand empathy and possibilities and improve communication, Gary adds that “the thing with play is that you can only really engage in play and access all of the abilities of play when you feel safe.”
As adults, we learn to see the world as a proving ground rather than a playground, and that can put us in fight, flight, or freeze, sending creativity and play offline and “it takes some interventions to get us back, to get the play center back online.”
Bringing a spirit of play into workplaces or difficult conversations, “doesn’t mean that we’re just goofing off. It’s just that we’re bringing those childlike qualities: curiosity, wonder, empathy, creativity.”
Gary says as adults, we have to give ourselves permission. Play comes with vulnerability, and many people don’t give themselves permission because they fear being judged.
He says particularly for Black people, “where they felt like they’ve had to mask for so long, this may be a very uncomfortable situation, to think, ‘what? I can start to bring some of my original qualities and people are going to accept me?’”
Small Playful Things
To add a little bit of playfulness to your day, Gary suggests starting small. Do a light check-in with coworkers at the start of a meeting to build a sense of community, add a quip or a pun to your email signature, don’t match your socks, or some other small, playful ritual for yourself.
Gary also advises being mindful. “We have a negativity bias because that’s how we stay alive. Our brains are wired to remember, in HD, all the bad things that happened…Positive things, if you’re not more conscious about it, you forget.”
Because of this, Gary’s advice is “as you are doing these small playful things, check-in with yourself. That might have felt a little bit scary at first, but after it’s over, how do I feel?... The only way that you start doing more of it is when you start to realize, oh, this is actually working.”
Connect with Gary Ware:
Resources:
The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts, Gary Chapman
The 5 Love Languages of Children, Gary Chapman
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