According to studies, promoting play in the work environment can make employees less stressed, more engaged, creative, and productive. Joining Melanie Parish on today’s show is Jeff Harry, an international speaker who has worked with Google, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines, Adobe, the NFL, Amazon, and Facebook, helping their staff to infuse more play into the day-to-day. He explains the importance and benefits of playing or having fun at work, particularly in this period of isolation and virtual communication. Start unleashing your inner child as Jeff explains how play fits into work, leadership, and life.
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Listen to the podcast here
Playing At Work With Jeff Harry
I’m here with Jeff Harry. He shows individuals and companies how to tap into their true selves to feel their happiest and most fulfilled all by playing. Jeff has worked with Google, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines, Adobe, the NFL, Amazon and Facebook helping their staff to infuse more play into the day-to-day. Jeff is an international speaker who’s presented at conferences all over the world and has shown audiences how major issues in the workplace can be solved using play. Jeff believes that we already have many of the answers we seek, and simply by unleashing our inner child, we can find our purpose and in turn help to create better world.
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Jeff, I’m excited to have you on my show. We’ve been having this great online conversation between the two of us, but I want to bring everyone else in it. It’s great to have you here.
I’m excited. Thanks for having me.
Our mind is designed to have a negativity bias. We shouldn't beat ourselves up for it. Share on XI want to dive in and give a little backstory about this idea that people who are in privilege, often it’s white middle-aged men who have great experience in leadership, and then they write books about it. We were talking about the idea leadership and how you can’t leave out people who don’t have that privilege. You were talking about a workshop that you led. Can you talk about that a little bit?
I ran workshops. There were two different ones, but the one that I’m thinking about is the Dudes, Do Better. I’m running it with my friend Humira Hamid. It’s called Dude’s, Do Better: Check Your Company Privilege to Flourish. It’s about calling out founders. You see a lot of startup founders, at least here in the US, that want to change the world. They believe their app is going to change the world. There’s such a level of male privilege in that of being like, “We’re going to do amazing things,” but then they’re not having that much of an impact. Besides telling the story that they are heroes, they’re not helping the communities that are struggling. They’re not opening up doors for people that might not have a chance.
This guy Van Jones, he used to live in Oakland and he worked for Green for All. He now works for CNN. I remember he was speaking to a group of MBA students at their graduation. It was at the Presidio San Francisco MBA Program. It was mostly white men. He challenged them to, “As you create your businesses, take the felony checkbox off of your hiring documents.” He says, “The reason why I say that is because there are a lot of people of color that went to jail for small infractions like carrying a certain amount of weed, which you also did. You did the same thing. I know all of you partied as well, but because you come from a privileged background and you were able to get bailed out by your parents, or you didn’t get pulled over because you happen to be white, or you live in a rich neighborhood where they don’t have a lot of police patrols. You got that advantage. Take the felony checkout list off because there are a lot of people that have a criminal record that should be given a second chance when you’ve been given multiple chances to fail and come back. Other people should get that same right.”
We read about all of this theoretically. We read the books. We think and talk about it, but that sounds edgy for many people because they think they don’t want felons. When they’re picturing a felon, they’re probably not picturing someone who was ticketed or got charged with riding a bicycle on a sidewalk or something like loitering, then it spun out in some way.
Once you’re in the system, you can’t get out of that. Especially in the US, there was a clear drive, especially in California to send people of color especially black males to jail. Why? Because it was cheap labor. A lot of for-profit prisons needed the labor. Police got benefits from this, kickbacks and things like that. There’s a lot of stuff that we are not acknowledging. What I was saying earlier about being a white man in a leadership position is challenging yourself to be like, “As much as I earned this, what are some of the ways in which I didn’t earn this? What are some of the ways in which I happened to benefit? How many jobs or job interviews or opportunities that I get because I knew somebody that knew somebody that knew somebody that looked like me.”
I saw this on Twitter. They were talking about diversity hires and being like, “Why don’t we already have all these diversity hires?” It was this white guy talking about diversity hires. This black woman was like, “Can we also talk about homogenous hires where you hire people that look like you? Why are we so critical of diversity hires when we do so little of that? When we hire someone that looks exactly like us, we don’t question it. We don’t wonder about that. We don’t look critically on that and be like, ‘Is this the right thing? Are we going to get the right diversity of thought by hiring another guy named Todd?’”
That’s a great example around diversity and people of color. Is there anything you can add about women? I spend a lot of time thinking about women in leadership roles, especially in tech, and your background is there as well. What should we be talking about there?
I made a video about this. My friend put me onto this. She’s phenomenal. She taught me a lot about feminine and masculine leadership. How a lot of masculine leadership is very decisive and analytical like, “Let’s get from A to B to C.” It’s very grit oriented. Also, masculine leadership can be very arrogant and aggressive. At least in the US, we’ve celebrated a lot of masculine leadership. A lot of women have been forced to be more in their masculine in order to get respect. Angie talks about the power of what feminine leadership brings you.
In feminine leadership, it’s a lot more adaptable, resilient, compassionate, empathetic. It’s a lot more play. A guy can also be strong and as feminine as well. I feel like I am stronger in my feminine partly because I was raised by two older sisters and my mom that played a major role in my life. We need to be adopting more of those feminine leadership traits and a perfect example of someone that’s been able to balance both strong masculine and iron strong feminine, but more so leaning feminine, a little bit more is the prime minister of New Zealand. Ardern is her last name.
Many successful, rich, and famous people are not that happy. They all suffer from something called affluent deadness. Share on XShe’s leading from decisiveness but also leading with compassion and with empathy as she worked with her citizens. She was like, “We’re going to lock down for a long time like two months straight. We’re not going to let anyone in, but I have a level of compassion that I want to communicate to you through my actions. I’m going to subsidize you so you don’t have to go to work. I’m going to subsidize businesses so that you don’t go out of business.” She was leading from both. Because of that, 25 people have died in all of New Zealand total. We have had more people die in one retirement home in the US than they have had in all of New Zealand.
We have 3,000 deaths happening per day here in the US because we’ve led from such a toxic masculine standpoint. We forced people to open up their shops again. We forced businesses to try to figure it out, which has been rough, and then 10,000 small businesses have gone out of business. We’re like, “Tough luck.” This is for the US, but we’ve given out $1,200. Meanwhile, I don’t know how much you’re getting in Canada, but I heard it in England, they got between $6,000 to $8,000 over the span of a couple of months to get by. We could have stayed close and kept all the COVID rates down if we simply had taken the $2.2 trillion from the CARES Act and distributed that to people. Instead, we gave it to a bunch of corporations. Who knows what they did with the money? Now we’re in this situation where people that would agree with each other are fighting against each other. We’ve had a lot of unnecessary deaths all due to toxic masculinity, in my opinion.
That’s interesting to think about. I’ll answer the question about Canada at least as far as I know it. Canada has been much more comparable to New Zealand. We have the CERB, which gave people who were out of work about $2,000 a month while they were out of work. It went on for maybe 4 or 5 months, and then unemployment kicked in after that. Small businesses were able to get loans with about $10,000 forgivable. There’s another round of those as well. They have been given these chunks to keep going. It has been a huge difference between the two. Perhaps Justin Trudeau was expressing his feminine leadership. It’s interesting to think about that. I want to talk a little bit about play. You had a New York Times article about play. I’d love to hear a little more about how you see play and how it fits into work, leadership, life, all of those things.
I’m glad you brought that up. I’m glad we first talked about feminine and masculine leadership because I feel like there’s something powerful about play, which is leaning more towards the feminine that’s important in the workplace. I define play as any joyful act where you forget about time, where there is no purpose. There are no results. You are fully in love with the process. You don’t have an anxiety about the future. You don’t have any regrets about the past. You are fully in the zone. Another way I referred to it is like you’re in flow. Marcus Buckingham refers to it as your red thread work. Gay Hendricks refers to it as your zone of genius.
It’s the work that you would do even if no one was around, even if you weren’t getting paid to do it because you love it so much. When you as a leader can help your staff find that flow work, find their play at work, they can be not exponentially productive, but they are so much more fulfilled at work. I say this to a lot of leaders. Right now, I would recommend you reach out to your staff and ask them a simple question, “What part of your job do you love doing the most? What aspects of your job do you do where you forget about time, where it’s so good that even if we weren’t paying you, you would do this?”
They’ll tell you. Maybe some of them will say like, “I love connecting with clients or I love connecting with people.” Let’s look at your day or week. What percentage of time do you do that work? “I’m only speaking to clients maybe 15% of my day or 15% of my week.” How can we increase that to 20%, maybe 30 minutes to an hour more? Studies have found when you do that, it has a ripple effect on all the other work that you do. If you get them in flow and have them do their flow work or their play work to start, that makes them so much more productive throughout the day. You’re also communicating to them that you’re like, “Not only do I want to get stuff out of you, but I care about you. I see you for you. I want to help you to be doing more of the stuff that makes you come alive.”
I love this idea of play. I love the idea of losing time. That’s such a clear measurable for looking at play, looking at when you’re in that zone. It happens for me when I go swimming. I swim three days a week and I love it. I’m curious about how that loss of time and flow might be impacted from the driving 8-hour, 10-hour, 12-hour workday that we do these days.
I’ve been fascinated with the eight-hour workday. I’ve been like, “Where does it come from?” I did a little bit of research and found out that a Welsh labor activist by the name of Robert Owen came up with the eight-hour workday back in 1817. Eight hours of work, eight hours of leisure, eight hours of sleep, that was the logic behind it. After that happened, nobody touched it for 100 years. Some National Labor activist tried to do it in the US but besides that, no one touched it. At least in the US, it got implemented by Henry Ford back in the Great Depression around 1926. He couldn’t get enough staff to work the assembly lines because he was working them 11 to 15 hours a day. People were dying on the assembly lines.
He implements the eight-hour workday. He doubles everybody’s salary to get people to come back. It causes this ruckus in the car industry but also the industries in general. What’s crazy is nothing has changed since 1926. Many years have passed and nobody’s questioned why we work eight hours a day. Meanwhile, there were a few studies done that found that people can’t be productive for more than two hours and 53 minutes of the day. Yet our workday is now extended. At least here in the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics say it’s extended to 8.8 hours. If people are only productive for three hours and they’re there for 8.8 hours, what are they doing for 5.8 hours?
They’re doing BS work. They’re doing stupid meetings. They’re doing work to make themselves look busy. They’re hopping on social media. They’re looking for other jobs. Eighty five percent of people are disengaged at work around the world. Clearly whatever normal was, we’re completely doing that wrong. We have an opportunity here during COVID to reset and be like, “What do we want the new normal to look like?” If you know your staff can only focus for three hours a day, what is the work that you most want them to focus on?
If you know that play could help your staff, instead of micromanaging them which also stresses you out, why don’t you give them the freedom to figure out how they’re going to get to this solution. Empower them and allow them to fail and experiment. Live up to the values that are on your posters on your walls and allow people to take risks. I hate thinking outside the box, but think that there is no box that exists. Right now, what we’re doing is we’re doing brainstorming sessions in box rooms, around box tables, where you have to it in one hour. It’s like, “This is horrible.” We have to rethink how we’re doing all of our work. Why do we have a meeting that is an hour long? It doesn’t have to be allow long. It could be seventeen minutes. All this stuff is arbitrary. We have to start questioning what is not making us do our best work and making us feel fulfilled at work.
How do you structure your own work date given what you know about this?
People gravitate towards fun and whoever is enjoying themselves the most. Share on XI start my day with a TikTok. I start my day making a ridiculous video. It’s only a one-minute video, but I make it and I do it as consistently as possible because it’s my play. It primes my mind to see the rest of the day as play. It has no ROI. It has no productive value. It’s not bringing me any money. My friend Desiree taught me this, but because I start my day with a TikTok, it is then after that I asked the question, “How can it get any better than this?” What’s interesting about that question is you would ask it from a curious state. From a positive psychology mindset, your brain is constantly looking for patterns.
When you ask, “I did this TikTok. How can it get any better than this? I was on this podcast. How can it get any better than this? I’m about to meet with Melanie and we’re going to have this awesome conversation. How can it get any better than this? I’m meeting with a film director with a bunch of my play people. We’re going to all brainstorm how we can help promote playing with this awesome film that we saw. How could it get any better than this? I get to see my girlfriend and her kids and hang out with them. We’re going to watch Dark Materials.”
You start to stack all of the prime. You start to prime your mind over and over again to look for positive patterns. The flip side of that is when someone says they have a bad day, I challenged them on that because thoughts usually only last between 9 and 90 seconds. What we do is we have a bad moment and then we ruminate about that bad moment. We ruminate and ruminate until we’ve done it a thousand times over. We look for other bad moments throughout the day. You can simply shift your day by simply asking yourself the question, how can I get any better than this?
I love that question. It feels so relevant when I work with clients. There are always clients who elevate the positive and I always have clients who elevate the negative. It’s such a choice in every moment that they make.
I even challenged some of my clients to track their negative and positive thoughts throughout the day and be like, “What’s the percentage of negative to positive?” Let’s be aware of it. Let’s play that game and see where we’re at, and then see if somehow, we can improve or address that. Our mind is designed to have a negativity bias. We shouldn’t beat ourselves up for it. The inner critic is there to protect you from all the dangers of the world. The fact that we don’t have tigers and elephants attacking us anymore or any other species like that, then it’s running amok. We simply need to figure out how do we play with that inner critic and quiet it down so that we can listen to that inner curiosity and follow that.
I always love to take a minute and ask my guests about imposter syndrome. I know there are lots of people in the world that experience imposter syndrome. I’m sure you’ve talked to people, known people, worked with people who have imposter syndrome of some kind. I’m not asking you to bare your soul, although, feel free if you want to. What have you learned about imposter syndrome over the years that you’ve been working with leaders?
I myself still go through it from time to time. The only reason why I’ve been able to catch it more and more is I think of this Viola Davis quote that said, “You either claim who you are or you end up chasing your worth for the rest of your life.” I don’t want to chase my worth anymore. I’ve done that. I had that experience. I did that when I was in high school. Many of us did that in high school where we trying to get the approval of the cool kids. How did that work out? How much do you think about those kids now? You don’t. I always ask people who are you trying to impress right now? Why are we still doing high school even now in our 20s, 30s and 40s? What are we doing with this?
What grounds me is I think of one of the top regrets of the dying, “I wish I had the courage to live the life that I wanted to live and not the life that others expected of me.” Having my dad pass away, seeing other people that I love pass away, it’s like, “I don’t have that much time.” Being that I don’t and I don’t even know how much time I do have, I don’t have time to pretend to be somebody else. I don’t enjoy it. I did that. It wasn’t fun. I got accepted. I got into all that stuff. Some things that I challenged people now on is I know a lot of successful, rich and famous people. They’re not that happy. They all suffer from something I coined affluent deadness. There is a deadness in their eyes. They can buy anything they want. They can travel anywhere they want. They can do anything they want. When you look at them in the eye, they look dead in some ways.
They either look like they’re so worried about losing their money or they’re worried that they might have a net worth of $5 million and someone has a net worth of $10 million. There’s never enough or they look sad because they thought when they got to this echelon, when they got to this part, all of their worries would go away. Instead, none of them went in and maybe they’re even worse now. They have the audacity to post on Instagram or Facebook or whatever it is and brag about their riches and pretend like they’re happy. I asked them afterwards, I’m like, “Why are you posting that stuff?” They’re like, “I do it for the external validation.” They’re not happy.
They lie to everybody else that’s trying to get up there, and then nobody’s happy. This is why I talk about play so much of like to live a fulfilling life is to find out what makes you come alive. That is your play. That is those play moments. You think of your favorite moments in life, they’re play moments. For someone to be able to explore and finding that internal joy, that internal fulfillment, if you can do that, you’re rich beyond belief. You’re going to attract all of this goodness. Your business is going to be more successful. Things are going to be more successful.
I’ve seen it firsthand when I’m working with my staff and we’re doing awesome things. The quote from Steven Johnson is, “The future is where people are having the most fun.” People gravitate towards fun. People gravitate to whoever is enjoying themselves the most. When you’re at dinner, when we could have dinner at restaurants and you heard all these people laughing and cheering over there. You’d be like, “What’s that? I want to be over there.” Follow your curiosity and play because it’s going to bring you to a more fulfilling place than if you had millions in your bank account.
It’s been such a rough year for play especially I think of those explorations, journeys, restaurants, trips and travel. It has become about those internal moments of play or joy. They’re so poignant. I talk with my clients all the time about seeking joy. If your tea smells good, take it all in. Those small moments where you’re fully present because they’re the fuel that keep you going through all of the crazy that we’ve been in.
Expectations are the thief of joy. Share on XLook at it from like up a kid’s mindset. I was working with a client that I was like, “What do you want to do?” She’s like, “I want to travel the world. That is what I’ve been doing. I’m a traveler.” She couldn’t do it at that point. She reframed it of like, “What can I do right now? What is it that I love to do about travel? What I love about travel is I love connecting with people from other countries. How do I do that?” She started looking for all these travel networks, Nomadic Network, Camp Indie, all these ones. Now she’s connecting on 3 or 4 happy hours a week, connecting with people from other countries. The bonus is when COVID restrictions lift, she has all these new people she can save. Sometimes we even have reframed like yes, we lost a lot of stuff in 2020. Adults are so fixated on results and expectations or the thief of joy. Expectations are such the thief of joy that we had such visions of what 2020 was going to be.
When that didn’t happen, we couldn’t let go. We are like, “This sucks.” The people that were able to thrive in 2020 were able to mourn what was not going to be able to happen, “I can’t travel the world. I can’t double my business. I can’t get married. I can’t find the person I’m going to fall in love with. I can’t do that, but what can I do?” They mourned what they did, then they let that go so that they can create something with the time that they have left. Right now, you still have time to redefine your 2020. I write this thing called the Fun Joy Play Index because many people forget their resolutions within three months. I ask people to reflect on what were the fun and joyful play moments of 2020 even during this rough time.
What were some of the most life affirming or epiphany filled moments for you? What happened? Go back in your email, go back in your Instagram, go back and look because you’d be amazed how much you accomplished or how much you got through or all the tough things that you got through. You’d have a lot of admiration for yourself. I challenged people then to be like, what fun and joy play moments do you want to have in 2021 even if we stay in lockdown? Be creative, what could you still do to bring more fun, joy and play into your life?
What do you do for self-care?
Play, when I say self-care it’s whatever is fun. I have a basketball hoop, I’ll go running, whatever is fun for me. l play with kids. I don’t have a particular hobby. I follow my curiosity. I feel everything seems like play to me.
Where can people find and why should they contact you?
They can find me at RediscoverYourPlay.com. If you simply go to the website, you can click the Let’s Play button where I have a bunch of play exercises that you can implement with your teams or for yourself to figure yourself out. If I was to answer why people should contact me? It’s like play, you can or you can’t. It’s totally up to you. What I feel my clients benefit from is that we finally start to reshape how you look at problems. How do you address issues that you think are serious and help you to not take yourself so seriously, but still tackle the problem with a lot of grit, passion, and identify what is the thing that makes you come alive? That’s what the world needs right now. As Howard Thurman says, “The world needs for more people to come alive.”
Here’s an interesting exercise that I have a lot of people do. If you want to figure out how to play more, reach out to 3 to 5 of your friends and ask them these two questions. What value do I bring to your life? A lot of times we don’t know what we do for people. The second question is, when have you seen me come most alive? Another way of asking it is like, “When have you seen me most playful, most present, most joyful? What value do I bring to your life? When have you seen me most alive?” Ask 3 to 5 of your closest friends over the phone, very vulnerable and see what answers come back to you. You’ll be amazed with all of these ideas of ways in which you can bring more joy and fulfillment to your life and tap back into that inner child. That is what I provide people, a way in which to figure out how to tap back into their inner child so they can live the life they want to live.
Thank you so much for being on my show. It’s been so much fun. You are a ball of energy. It’s a great way to end the week having this chat. It’s been fantastic to be with you.
Thanks so much for having me. This has been awesome.
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It’s been great having Jeff on the show. I loved hearing how he helps people experiment with play and to try finding the things that they love so much. They would do them even if they didn’t get paid. I also love his two questions that you can ask to get a sense of what things you should pay attention to by doing a little 360, asking five people, what do I bring to your life? When do you see me light up? When do you see me experienced joy? They’re such powerful questions and such a great way to tap into what matters to us and what has us feel alive. Go experiment.
Important Links:
- Jeff Harry
- Dude’s, Do Better: Check Your Company Privilege to Flourish
- New York Times article – How to Add More Play to Your Grown-Up Life, Even Now
- Fun Joy Play Index
About Jeff Harry
Jeff Harry shows individuals and companies how to tap into their true selves, to feel their happiest and most fulfilled — all by playing. Jeff has worked with Google, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines, Adobe, the NFL, Amazon and Facebook, helping their staff to infuse more play into the day-to-day. Jeff is an international speaker who has presented at conferences such as INBOUND, SXSW, and Australia’s Pausefest, showing audiences how major issues in the workplace can be solved using play.
Jeff was selected by Engagedly as one of the Top 100 HR Influencers of 2020 for his organizational development work around addressing toxicity in the workplace. His playwork has been featured in the New York Times, AJ+, SoulPancake, the SF Chronicle, and CNN. While we spend most of our time pretending to be important, serious grownups, it’s when we let go of that facade and just play, that the real magic happens.
Fully embracing your own nerdy genius — whatever that is — gives you the power to make a difference and change lives. Jeff believes that we already have many of the answers we seek, and by simply unleashing our inner child, we can find our purpose and, in turn, help to create a better world.
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