13. The Power of Play
Is the pressure to be perfect holding you back as a leader? What if letting go of perfectionism, and instead, embracing a spirit of play could unlock new levels of creativity, authenticity, and impact in your leadership?
If you're ready to break free from the trap of perfectionism and step into a more authentic, enjoyable, and impactful way of leading, this episode will show you how. By giving yourself permission to be messy, take risks, and have more fun, you open the door to accelerated growth and more meaningful engagement with your team.
Join me in this episode to discover how shifting from a mindset of pressure to one of progress and play can revolutionize your impact as a leader. You’ll learn why play is the secret to reclaiming your presence, creativity, and authentic leadership, and practical strategies for cultivating a spirit of play in your day-to-day work. Let's dive in!
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What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why perfectionism and pressure are holding you back from your full potential as a leader.
How cultivating a spirit of play can boost your creativity, accelerate your learning, and enhance your problem-solving skills.
The science behind why play is essential for brain development and how to apply it in your leadership.
Practical strategies for integrating more play into your day-to-day work, even amidst high-pressure situations.
How to shift from a mindset of perfectionism to one of progress, presence, and play.
The transformative impact that leading with play can have on your team and your own enjoyment of your work.
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Full Episode Transcript:
Perfection and pressure are stealing your presence and it's holding you back. What if letting go of the need to be flawless could open the door to real growth and leadership success? In today's episode, we're diving in to the power of play. Why shifting from pressure to progress can help you lead with confidence, creativity, and authenticity. If you're ready to break free from perfectionism and start leading with more impact, ease, and enjoyment, this is a conversation you've been waiting for.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey podcast listeners, welcome to today's episode. We are going to be focusing on a lot of P words, but I'll start off with the power of play. This is really what the episode is about, but it's not just about playing, it's about how playing can really help you with progress as well as your leadership presence. One of the things that I hear from so many of the women leaders that I coach and that I network with is that presence is so important, but it's oftentimes kind of gray and confusing. How do I be more present, right? The answer is actually play. And I'm gonna dive in and share with you some statistics around it.
But before that, I just wanna give you a sort of image, paint a picture for yourself, notice for yourself what happens when perfectionism and the pressure to achieve and accomplish, which is really masculine energy, right? The task-oriented, let's get the thing done, let's check the things off the box. When we are really focused on winning the game or getting the score or doing the thing right, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves and we think that things have to be perfect.
So let's dive into this scenario, see what comes up for you, notice yourself in this, and let's get into it. Imagine you're in a high-stakes leadership team meeting. The air feels heavy with expectations. You've prepared for days trying to anticipate every question, every critique, every possible flaw in your presentation.
Your mind is racing, rehearsing perfect responses, and yet at the meeting, as it unfolds, you find yourself more focused on your performance than the actual conversation. You're holding back, afraid of making a mistake, and while everyone seems to be engaging naturally, you're stuck in a loop of pressure and perfectionism. You're thinking about how you're showing up, you're really focused on what you remember saying and you're not actually engaging in the meeting in front of you, you're really having a conversation with yourself in your own head.
Now imagine this, the same scenario, but with a twist. You walk in with a sense of lightness, curiosity, and a willingness to play with ideas instead of rehearsing them endlessly in your head. You have an outline of things that are most important for you and things that you want to make sure that you are sharing with the group. But you're present, you're engaged, you're noticing the faces around you, you are interacting with the people that are speaking, and you're more focused on contributing to the conversation than being flawless.
This is where progress happens, not in the pressure of perfection and the pressure to perform, but in the power of play. When we allow ourselves the ability to play, we actually open ourselves up to more perspective and we're able to use that prefrontal cortex that we have in our brains to really connect the dots and to think more creatively. But this can only happen if we really focus on giving ourselves permission to play.
Oftentimes what happens in our limbic system, which is our survival brain, is when we're so focused on getting a task done, making it perfect, we feel all this pressure, we start moving out of that prefrontal cortex, like really excited to grow and learn, and we start moving into the survival, like wanting to get it all right, to check the boxes off.
And when we move into this zone, we are feeling more stress, more pressure, and we almost like move the stakes for ourselves to so much higher than it actually is. And what it does is it makes us so much more focused on our task versus the bigger room. Reading the room, being present to the room, being engaged in the environment around you.
And this is what happens a lot of times when I coach clients and they're like, well, I prepared a whole script and I'm reading the script. And people say that I sound like a robot versus like a human because you're so focused on reading the script versus being present to people, having eye contact, allowing yourself to flow, to have fun.
And here's a little confession for the podcast listeners. I actually don't script out all my podcasts. I know a lot of people do, and there's no judgment on them. But really, for me to play with this podcast, to go with the flow, for me to be more authentic, it is really allowing myself to play.
I have an outline that helps guide me, but I give myself permission to bring in things that are important, to bring in examples from my clients that are important to share other things that might come up as I'm doing my podcast. I just wanted to also share that I not only speak about this I allow myself to do this as well, to really play.
So this podcast episode is for those high achieving women who are ready to break free of the trap of perfectionism and reclaim their presence, creativity, and authentic leadership. Today, we'll explore how shifting from that pressure to play can really unlock the potential for you, but also the potential of those around you as they watch you, as they learn from you.
So I want to talk about that piece of it, that survival brain. When we're in our survival brain, like I said, it's really about perfectionism. And when we're in this perfectionism and wanting to just check off the task list, what happens over time with this trap of perfectionism is it takes an emotional toll on us. We are constantly putting standards for ourselves at really high stakes.
And what I hear from a lot of the women that I coach is that they want to do things themselves. So they're also not wanting to delegate as much because they have this fear that it's not perfect and they have a fear that people will judge them so they put this really high standard on themselves and it leads to a lot of burnout. It also leads to self-doubt because when you have more things thrown your way if you're starting to show up as a powerful leader, then oftentimes people are going to give you more responsibility.
And for the women I coach when you get more responsibility, you're going to get more money, too. But it doesn't mean that you have to be stressed out that you have all this pressure on you. And I think that is the trap. A lot of people think that the more I take on, the more stress I'll have, and the more I will just be feeling how I'm feeling already, but 10 times it. So actually, I don't wanna take that leadership role. And they think that it's actually the work that's causing that.
But what really is happening is that you're creating that for yourself because you're putting that pressure on yourself and you have this mindset that you're focused on perfectionism, performing and pressure as a way to motivate you. And it oftentimes works, and that's where it gets sticky. Because oftentimes in our career, when we are like this with ourselves, we get things done and people start trusting us more and they want to give us more things.
But what happens as you continue growing in your leadership is that you not only need to get the job done, the expectation is that you are speaking up in meetings, that you are being present, that you are aware. And also a lot of people like to work with people that seem like they're having fun, that seem like they're not stressed out all the time, and you're always worried that they're going to like have a nervous breakdown because they're so busy and always super stressed out.
So it becomes more and more important as you excel into leadership that you learn how to play so that you are not so focused on being a perfectionist, being a robot, getting things right, but that you allow yourself to make mistakes because when you make mistakes, you actually learn faster.
And here's another really important thing about play. It helps you to learn faster. Lego Foundation at MIT actually did a study together, and they found that playful learning approaches can lead and boost students' engagement and facilitate faster learning by up to 20% as compared to more traditional learning methods.
For example, I had a client who was really concerned about this leadership team meeting that she was going to join and she had a lot of pressure on herself to act and be a certain way. And she left that meeting feeling really let down on herself. She felt like she didn't engage. She felt like she didn't speak up. She didn't even feel like her brain was working.
She kind of came from that meeting and said, I don't know what happened to me. I didn't speak up, I had opinions, but in that moment, all I could do is think about all of the things that people around me know more than me, right?
So she was really focused on that pressure center of your brain and that pressure center inside her that things needed to be perfect. And what happened was she actually felt like she was not interested in the topic. But here's what I was sharing with her. It's not that you weren't interested in what was happening. You were so focused on yourself and performing that you actually weren't present to what was happening and you weren't allowing yourself to learn, to listen, to be curious, to engage, right?
And here's another study from the Pediatrics Journal that talks about how play is essential for children's brain development. And I want you to think about this, not just as for children, but for yourself. Think about going to a leadership team meeting for the first time.
If you think that play is essential to building problem-solving skills, critical thinking, and emotional regulation, you might show up very differently for that leadership team meeting. Instead of being so focused on saying the right thing, you may allow yourself to play more, right? Because unstructured play fosters creativity and enhances a child's ability to engage and learn through curiosity.
This is partly why people are introducing a lot of team building activities, because the team building activities leads to more creativity, it leads to more connection with the leadership team, and then guess what happens after that? You jump into a leadership team meeting and you're not actually playing a game or whatever, but you have those same sort of skill sets in mind.
You're starting to connect with people and you're being more playful and you solve problems, big, critical business problems in a more playful way where you're open, where you're using that creative thought center and you're not focused on saying things perfectly or presenting things perfectly. You allow yourself to play.
The other piece of play is also to allow yourself to be messy. If you see little kids play and learn, it's messy. And I think oftentimes as adults in the world, we think we need to be polished, it needs to be perfect. But if we look at a child learning how to eat, learning how to walk, learning how to do something, It's messy, they wobble, there's food everywhere, they're missing their mouths all the time. And that being patient and allowing them to learn these things is really important. But as adults, we're often really critical on ourselves, even if it's the first time we've done something.
We go and we try to socialize a new idea and we get shot down and we feel like the world has ended and we feel more pressure on ourselves and feel bad and this is the cycle that leads to burnout, versus being like, I'm gonna go for it, I'm gonna socialize this thing, and whatever happens, this experience is gonna allow me to socialize it again in a different way, in a better way. You could look at it more playfully and say, this is gonna be the first time I'm gonna try it out. And if I don't make it, it's just gonna be great learning for the next time.
Do you see just how the difference that energy is? That energy to try again, to learn, and the stakes don't feel as high, and you feel more light and fun and creative versus this all-or-nothing feeling that it has to be this way. I need to present it this way and it has to be perfect.
The thing about being perfect and that part of our brains that focus on perfectionism, it doesn't allow for things to spontaneously happen. And if you're not allowing for things to spontaneously happen to hit you, for you to engage with it, then you're not really being present. And this is really what leadership presence is about. It's about being able to bring yourself to a meeting, playing 100%, being fully present to what's in front of you.
I used to love to play dodgeball. I actually did it as an adult in Chicago. One of my friends used to organize this game every Saturday in the wintertime in Chicago, because it was so cold, and I would love it. And I realized part of why I loved it is because it's a 100% experience. If you're in it to win it, you're gonna be 100% present.
I'm not gonna be thinking about work, I'm not gonna be thinking about work. I'm not gonna be thinking about what I'm doing later today I am thinking about not getting hit by a ball or I'm thinking about hitting somebody else with a ball right, so you're like a hundred percent in it. This is a classic example of what it means to be fully present.
So if you think about that, going to play a sport or being in a dodgeball competition, and for those of you who are not from America that are listeners, that are international, dodgeball is a game where you have a set number of balls. There's probably like seven or five people on each team.
And the goal is to either hit someone with a ball, which means they're out on their side, or not get hit with a ball because that means you're out and you can't play. So you're always on the lookout, right? Like the corner of your eye, is somebody there? Is somebody here? Who can I hit? So you're using all of your awareness and you're fully present. Your body's in it, you're in it, you are 100% present to the field. Because if you're not, guess what? You're gonna get hit by a ball. Or you're gonna miss. Or you could either miss somebody and then get hit by a ball at the same time.
So what I want you to think about is that level of presence that you have when you're playing sports, when you're 100% into something. If you take that and you put yourself into a leadership team meeting, what could you expect, right? That level of play, that level of awareness, that level of listening to what's being talked about and really wanting to play and not being so focused on getting the right answer. It might just be more like adding to get the right answer or asking questions in a really curious way.
That is the power of play, that you can really channel it into your presence, your leadership presence. But if we're so focused on doing it perfectly or that perfectionism, we're so focused, with all of the pressure on us, we're going to feel really heavy. And we're going to be like, we can't stop thinking about this thing because something bad is going to happen.
And when you have a part of your brain that's like, I can't stop thinking about this thing, then it's gonna take away from your presence and you're not going to show up like the leader that you have the potential to be. You're not gonna show up with creativity, you're not gonna show up with the ability to ask really great curious questions.
You're probably going to mostly be focused on yourself, looking inward, judging yourself, potentially judging people around you, being worried that they're going to perceive you in a certain way. So this is really an invitation, a permission that I want you to give yourself to play. And notice when you're playing your level of creativity, your level of curiosity, your level of engagement.
When I give my clients this assignment to play, they actually tell me, sometimes people come up and they're like, oh my gosh, I've been playing so hard that people at work are like, what happened to you? Did you just come back from vacation? You seem so light, you seem so engaged, you seem so happy, like what happened?
Or I've even had a client where they're like, you know, they allowed themselves to play even at a holiday party, just play full out. She was playing ping pong. She was a master at it. She was so great. And oftentimes people are like, have you been drinking? What's going on? Because they're not used to your level of aliveness of play, of enjoyment. They're used to you walking around stressed out, running from meeting to meeting. They're used to the heaviness that you carry.
And I totally relate to that. Earlier in my career, I was one of those people. Super busy, always felt like I needed to be somewhere else, do something else. And at the time, like I said, it was actually okay. I wasn't leading big teams. My presence wasn't that important, but getting the job done was.
But guess what? It also wasn't super fun for me to walk around with all this pressure and I didn't enjoy it. And there was cost to me, right? A cost of being playful, a cost of that enjoyment. And I probably could have learned faster if I allowed myself more permission to play.
So this is really what's on the line for you as a woman leader. If you want to be more present, if you want to make a bigger impact, if you want more enjoyment, then it is this power of play and giving yourself permission to do so. Because oftentimes people use these excuses that cause them to not dive into really playing full on.
For example, I have one client who was like, I need to do a different job. This job that I'm doing right now is too in the weeds and I am having to dive in and clean a lot of processes up. I need a job where it's more strategic, where I could really focus on the big picture. And I actually let her know, like, it's not the job actually, it's you, it's your focus area. It's you prioritizing pressure and performance over other things that might feel scary, that might feel bigger picture, that may, if you allowed yourself to play with more, you could grow in those skills.
Oftentimes we put these thoughts in our way that it is the environment around us, but really it's us putting the pressure on ourselves and it's saying that we need to be in the weeds because I will also tell you this there's a lot of people who have these big strategic jobs, and they carry around the same issues.
They're still diving into the weeds because they have a hard time letting go of things that they feel that they have high standards over. And it does feel scary to play in a bigger way when your focus is at a higher level, if it's at a strategic level and you're having to play with the leadership team in a way that you haven't been in the past, that could feel scary.
For example, I was very used to doing budgets, the financial planning all of the sort of financial pieces. And that was like my wheelhouse that was my expertise. It was easy for me to do that stuff. It was still hard, right? There's still a lot of things to do but it wasn't until I gave that stuff to my team, stepped away from perfectionism, allowed myself less pressure, and said they can handle it. It really allowed me to have space to play in a bigger way, really building and creating relationships with other senior leaders, my peers and those above me to shift things, to do things more strategically.
But I had to give myself permission to do that, to shift from doing all the day-to-day in the weed stuff to doing this other piece that is actually way more about who I am being in the moment versus what I am doing in the moment. So the power of play is really about being versus doing. And at the highest levels of leadership, this being able to be present to hear what is going on around you, to read the room, to think creatively, to think out of the box.
These are the skills that really matter at that high level of leadership. It's not about the technical expertise of all the things. You can hire people for that, But the ability to go all in, go to a meeting and be creative, be risky, be messy, this is really the power of play. And it can unlock for you lots of creative thinking, lots of ability to share what really matters and what you see as important, but you have to give yourself that permission to play. Otherwise you're gonna be stuck in the same loops that you've been stuck in.
And like I always tell my clients, pressure and perfectionism got you this far, but it won't get you to that next level. This is really about presence, progress, and that happens when you allow yourself to play.
All right, I'm going to share one more study that is from Stanford University, and it showed that participants who engage in playful activities increase their creative output by 60% when compared to groups using more rigid methods. So even for you to like play at work, what could that look like for you?
I just wanted to give an example of me and my team. One of the things that I would do with them during budget season is we would come together, we would do these like 30 minute chunks of time where we're like all share what we're working on. Then we would go and do it. Sometimes it's separately, sometimes it's together. Then we'd come back together and just share what we did.
And it was almost like a game that we played where we were getting to play and interact with each other, but also get stuff done and then go back to do what we need to do, take our little breaks that we needed to. But it made everything much more fun and it made things feel like you are part of a team and you could be creative and it helped people think about different ways of doing stuff.
It's really using a lot of different parts of our brains that instead of just ticking boxes, we're actually engaging in a process that we know that we can improve, that we're feeling energized, feeling productive, and we're actually making lots of progress along the way versus feeling like it's super heavy. I also give the example or the metaphor of climbing a mountain.
We can either push each other along, be really sluggish, be really grumpy, feel like we've got to push it so hard and we're freaked out if it rains or something because we're so focused on this perfect hike versus allowing ourselves to play and engage. And if it rains, we're going to choose to play. We're going to be in it. We might splash a little, slip a little. We are climbing up this mountain together, we're having fun, we're high-fiving each other.
And I just want to give you that visual because oftentimes we don't even realize that we have been in this cycle of perfectionism and pressure until we feel burnt out, until we feel like, I don't even want to go to work the next day, or I'm not looking forward to this thing at all. You will notice that buildup versus if you allowed yourself to play.
And what I would do for people who are just very new to this idea is do something small. I wanna share a few practical tips with you that you can take into your day-to-day so that you can start practicing this play and shift away from this pressure and perfectionism and shift more towards progress and being present.
So number one, recognize when perfection or pressure is holding you back. You want to notice, check in with yourself, how am I feeling? How am I feeling about this task? How am I feeling about going to this meeting? You want to notice if you're very heavy in thinking and feeling like there is a big mountain to climb, an uphill battle. This is your opportunity to notice that perfectionism, that pressure, and this is your opportunity to shift to curiosity and play. Asking yourself, how could this be fun or different? Rather than aiming for perfectionism.
One of the mantras that I like to share with my clients is, if it ain't fun, I'm not doing it. So the question for you is to how to make it fun because obviously there's things that we have to do that don't feel fun, but how do you make it fun? How can you engage in this activity in a fun way? And even if it's a leadership team meeting, you can choose to take yourself there and have more fun with it.
Maybe you're gonna show up early, maybe you show up with your favorite drink, maybe you just allow yourself to stretch ahead of time in the meeting, before the meeting, you know, to get yourself, your body revved up, right? You wanna think about it is like, when in your life do you feel present and playful and how can you recreate that, but in the workplace?
So using those questions to ask yourself, how can I make this more fun? How can I make this more enjoyable? I actually had a yoga teacher who I remember during our, we were doing some very complicated position and he had said, you know, you could ask yourself even when you're doing this very complicated, very difficult position is, how can I make this enjoyable for myself? You know, just asking yourself that question. And it doesn't mean changing all the circumstances around you, it could just be something simple in your mind to say, I'm gonna think about this in a different way, or I'm gonna just like give myself more grace.
So you wanna have that playfulness with yourself, and you wanna have that relationship with yourself where you're noticing, am I having fun? Am I giving myself breaks? And I want you to celebrate small wins. Even if it's you going into the meeting and noticing yourself more curious, asking a question that you might have not asked before, getting more eye contact. Maybe you haven't fully moved away from a full script presentation, but you have less of that. Or at the beginning of the presentation, you open it up to a bigger question for everyone.
You want to be integrating these things and noticing and celebrating these small wins and not dwell on the imperfections. Because here, this is what people that are really perfectionists do. They're like, I didn't play, I didn't play well enough. It was too messy. And we're not allowing you to do that. We are celebrating the wins. We're celebrating even you being a more messy, imperfect version of yourself, but enjoying yourself.
I want you to think about this as a way of being and how you can actually use the power of play to really amp up your presence. Because what really happens, like all these studies are showing, is that when we're present and we're playful, we make more progress. We make way more progress and we enjoy it more. And we're less susceptible to being burnt out from the pressure, from feeling like you have to be perfect.
So I want you to go out there, permission to play. Let me know how this works for you. Try it on, see how it feels. And I wanna hear from you. Feel free to connect with me directly on LinkedIn, leave a review of this episode if it's hit you and you have learned some new skills, but really introducing this power of play and allowing yourself to expand your leadership in this way.
All right, well, that is the episode for today and I want to encourage you to go out and play all out, play hard. I will see you in next week's episode. We've got a big episode coming up, and I'm excited to see you there. Have a great rest of your week.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey podcast listeners, welcome to today's episode. We are going to be focusing on a lot of P words, but I'll start off with the power of play. This is really what the episode is about, but it's not just about playing, it's about how playing can really help you with progress as well as your leadership presence. One of the things that I hear from so many of the women leaders that I coach and that I network with is that presence is so important, but it's oftentimes kind of gray and confusing. How do I be more present, right? The answer is actually play. And I'm gonna dive in and share with you some statistics around it.
But before that, I just wanna give you a sort of image, paint a picture for yourself, notice for yourself what happens when perfectionism and the pressure to achieve and accomplish, which is really masculine energy, right? The task-oriented, let's get the thing done, let's check the things off the box. When we are really focused on winning the game or getting the score or doing the thing right, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves and we think that things have to be perfect.
So let's dive into this scenario, see what comes up for you, notice yourself in this, and let's get into it. Imagine you're in a high-stakes leadership team meeting. The air feels heavy with expectations. You've prepared for days trying to anticipate every question, every critique, every possible flaw in your presentation.
Your mind is racing, rehearsing perfect responses, and yet at the meeting, as it unfolds, you find yourself more focused on your performance than the actual conversation. You're holding back, afraid of making a mistake, and while everyone seems to be engaging naturally, you're stuck in a loop of pressure and perfectionism. You're thinking about how you're showing up, you're really focused on what you remember saying and you're not actually engaging in the meeting in front of you, you're really having a conversation with yourself in your own head.
Now imagine this, the same scenario, but with a twist. You walk in with a sense of lightness, curiosity, and a willingness to play with ideas instead of rehearsing them endlessly in your head. You have an outline of things that are most important for you and things that you want to make sure that you are sharing with the group. But you're present, you're engaged, you're noticing the faces around you, you are interacting with the people that are speaking, and you're more focused on contributing to the conversation than being flawless.
This is where progress happens, not in the pressure of perfection and the pressure to perform, but in the power of play. When we allow ourselves the ability to play, we actually open ourselves up to more perspective and we're able to use that prefrontal cortex that we have in our brains to really connect the dots and to think more creatively. But this can only happen if we really focus on giving ourselves permission to play.
Oftentimes what happens in our limbic system, which is our survival brain, is when we're so focused on getting a task done, making it perfect, we feel all this pressure, we start moving out of that prefrontal cortex, like really excited to grow and learn, and we start moving into the survival, like wanting to get it all right, to check the boxes off.
And when we move into this zone, we are feeling more stress, more pressure, and we almost like move the stakes for ourselves to so much higher than it actually is. And what it does is it makes us so much more focused on our task versus the bigger room. Reading the room, being present to the room, being engaged in the environment around you.
And this is what happens a lot of times when I coach clients and they're like, well, I prepared a whole script and I'm reading the script. And people say that I sound like a robot versus like a human because you're so focused on reading the script versus being present to people, having eye contact, allowing yourself to flow, to have fun.
And here's a little confession for the podcast listeners. I actually don't script out all my podcasts. I know a lot of people do, and there's no judgment on them. But really, for me to play with this podcast, to go with the flow, for me to be more authentic, it is really allowing myself to play.
I have an outline that helps guide me, but I give myself permission to bring in things that are important, to bring in examples from my clients that are important to share other things that might come up as I'm doing my podcast. I just wanted to also share that I not only speak about this I allow myself to do this as well, to really play.
So this podcast episode is for those high achieving women who are ready to break free of the trap of perfectionism and reclaim their presence, creativity, and authentic leadership. Today, we'll explore how shifting from that pressure to play can really unlock the potential for you, but also the potential of those around you as they watch you, as they learn from you.
So I want to talk about that piece of it, that survival brain. When we're in our survival brain, like I said, it's really about perfectionism. And when we're in this perfectionism and wanting to just check off the task list, what happens over time with this trap of perfectionism is it takes an emotional toll on us. We are constantly putting standards for ourselves at really high stakes.
And what I hear from a lot of the women that I coach is that they want to do things themselves. So they're also not wanting to delegate as much because they have this fear that it's not perfect and they have a fear that people will judge them so they put this really high standard on themselves and it leads to a lot of burnout. It also leads to self-doubt because when you have more things thrown your way if you're starting to show up as a powerful leader, then oftentimes people are going to give you more responsibility.
And for the women I coach when you get more responsibility, you're going to get more money, too. But it doesn't mean that you have to be stressed out that you have all this pressure on you. And I think that is the trap. A lot of people think that the more I take on, the more stress I'll have, and the more I will just be feeling how I'm feeling already, but 10 times it. So actually, I don't wanna take that leadership role. And they think that it's actually the work that's causing that.
But what really is happening is that you're creating that for yourself because you're putting that pressure on yourself and you have this mindset that you're focused on perfectionism, performing and pressure as a way to motivate you. And it oftentimes works, and that's where it gets sticky. Because oftentimes in our career, when we are like this with ourselves, we get things done and people start trusting us more and they want to give us more things.
But what happens as you continue growing in your leadership is that you not only need to get the job done, the expectation is that you are speaking up in meetings, that you are being present, that you are aware. And also a lot of people like to work with people that seem like they're having fun, that seem like they're not stressed out all the time, and you're always worried that they're going to like have a nervous breakdown because they're so busy and always super stressed out.
So it becomes more and more important as you excel into leadership that you learn how to play so that you are not so focused on being a perfectionist, being a robot, getting things right, but that you allow yourself to make mistakes because when you make mistakes, you actually learn faster.
And here's another really important thing about play. It helps you to learn faster. Lego Foundation at MIT actually did a study together, and they found that playful learning approaches can lead and boost students' engagement and facilitate faster learning by up to 20% as compared to more traditional learning methods.
For example, I had a client who was really concerned about this leadership team meeting that she was going to join and she had a lot of pressure on herself to act and be a certain way. And she left that meeting feeling really let down on herself. She felt like she didn't engage. She felt like she didn't speak up. She didn't even feel like her brain was working.
She kind of came from that meeting and said, I don't know what happened to me. I didn't speak up, I had opinions, but in that moment, all I could do is think about all of the things that people around me know more than me, right?
So she was really focused on that pressure center of your brain and that pressure center inside her that things needed to be perfect. And what happened was she actually felt like she was not interested in the topic. But here's what I was sharing with her. It's not that you weren't interested in what was happening. You were so focused on yourself and performing that you actually weren't present to what was happening and you weren't allowing yourself to learn, to listen, to be curious, to engage, right?
And here's another study from the Pediatrics Journal that talks about how play is essential for children's brain development. And I want you to think about this, not just as for children, but for yourself. Think about going to a leadership team meeting for the first time.
If you think that play is essential to building problem-solving skills, critical thinking, and emotional regulation, you might show up very differently for that leadership team meeting. Instead of being so focused on saying the right thing, you may allow yourself to play more, right? Because unstructured play fosters creativity and enhances a child's ability to engage and learn through curiosity.
This is partly why people are introducing a lot of team building activities, because the team building activities leads to more creativity, it leads to more connection with the leadership team, and then guess what happens after that? You jump into a leadership team meeting and you're not actually playing a game or whatever, but you have those same sort of skill sets in mind.
You're starting to connect with people and you're being more playful and you solve problems, big, critical business problems in a more playful way where you're open, where you're using that creative thought center and you're not focused on saying things perfectly or presenting things perfectly. You allow yourself to play.
The other piece of play is also to allow yourself to be messy. If you see little kids play and learn, it's messy. And I think oftentimes as adults in the world, we think we need to be polished, it needs to be perfect. But if we look at a child learning how to eat, learning how to walk, learning how to do something, It's messy, they wobble, there's food everywhere, they're missing their mouths all the time. And that being patient and allowing them to learn these things is really important. But as adults, we're often really critical on ourselves, even if it's the first time we've done something.
We go and we try to socialize a new idea and we get shot down and we feel like the world has ended and we feel more pressure on ourselves and feel bad and this is the cycle that leads to burnout, versus being like, I'm gonna go for it, I'm gonna socialize this thing, and whatever happens, this experience is gonna allow me to socialize it again in a different way, in a better way. You could look at it more playfully and say, this is gonna be the first time I'm gonna try it out. And if I don't make it, it's just gonna be great learning for the next time.
Do you see just how the difference that energy is? That energy to try again, to learn, and the stakes don't feel as high, and you feel more light and fun and creative versus this all-or-nothing feeling that it has to be this way. I need to present it this way and it has to be perfect.
The thing about being perfect and that part of our brains that focus on perfectionism, it doesn't allow for things to spontaneously happen. And if you're not allowing for things to spontaneously happen to hit you, for you to engage with it, then you're not really being present. And this is really what leadership presence is about. It's about being able to bring yourself to a meeting, playing 100%, being fully present to what's in front of you.
I used to love to play dodgeball. I actually did it as an adult in Chicago. One of my friends used to organize this game every Saturday in the wintertime in Chicago, because it was so cold, and I would love it. And I realized part of why I loved it is because it's a 100% experience. If you're in it to win it, you're gonna be 100% present.
I'm not gonna be thinking about work, I'm not gonna be thinking about work. I'm not gonna be thinking about what I'm doing later today I am thinking about not getting hit by a ball or I'm thinking about hitting somebody else with a ball right, so you're like a hundred percent in it. This is a classic example of what it means to be fully present.
So if you think about that, going to play a sport or being in a dodgeball competition, and for those of you who are not from America that are listeners, that are international, dodgeball is a game where you have a set number of balls. There's probably like seven or five people on each team.
And the goal is to either hit someone with a ball, which means they're out on their side, or not get hit with a ball because that means you're out and you can't play. So you're always on the lookout, right? Like the corner of your eye, is somebody there? Is somebody here? Who can I hit? So you're using all of your awareness and you're fully present. Your body's in it, you're in it, you are 100% present to the field. Because if you're not, guess what? You're gonna get hit by a ball. Or you're gonna miss. Or you could either miss somebody and then get hit by a ball at the same time.
So what I want you to think about is that level of presence that you have when you're playing sports, when you're 100% into something. If you take that and you put yourself into a leadership team meeting, what could you expect, right? That level of play, that level of awareness, that level of listening to what's being talked about and really wanting to play and not being so focused on getting the right answer. It might just be more like adding to get the right answer or asking questions in a really curious way.
That is the power of play, that you can really channel it into your presence, your leadership presence. But if we're so focused on doing it perfectly or that perfectionism, we're so focused, with all of the pressure on us, we're going to feel really heavy. And we're going to be like, we can't stop thinking about this thing because something bad is going to happen.
And when you have a part of your brain that's like, I can't stop thinking about this thing, then it's gonna take away from your presence and you're not going to show up like the leader that you have the potential to be. You're not gonna show up with creativity, you're not gonna show up with the ability to ask really great curious questions.
You're probably going to mostly be focused on yourself, looking inward, judging yourself, potentially judging people around you, being worried that they're going to perceive you in a certain way. So this is really an invitation, a permission that I want you to give yourself to play. And notice when you're playing your level of creativity, your level of curiosity, your level of engagement.
When I give my clients this assignment to play, they actually tell me, sometimes people come up and they're like, oh my gosh, I've been playing so hard that people at work are like, what happened to you? Did you just come back from vacation? You seem so light, you seem so engaged, you seem so happy, like what happened?
Or I've even had a client where they're like, you know, they allowed themselves to play even at a holiday party, just play full out. She was playing ping pong. She was a master at it. She was so great. And oftentimes people are like, have you been drinking? What's going on? Because they're not used to your level of aliveness of play, of enjoyment. They're used to you walking around stressed out, running from meeting to meeting. They're used to the heaviness that you carry.
And I totally relate to that. Earlier in my career, I was one of those people. Super busy, always felt like I needed to be somewhere else, do something else. And at the time, like I said, it was actually okay. I wasn't leading big teams. My presence wasn't that important, but getting the job done was.
But guess what? It also wasn't super fun for me to walk around with all this pressure and I didn't enjoy it. And there was cost to me, right? A cost of being playful, a cost of that enjoyment. And I probably could have learned faster if I allowed myself more permission to play.
So this is really what's on the line for you as a woman leader. If you want to be more present, if you want to make a bigger impact, if you want more enjoyment, then it is this power of play and giving yourself permission to do so. Because oftentimes people use these excuses that cause them to not dive into really playing full on.
For example, I have one client who was like, I need to do a different job. This job that I'm doing right now is too in the weeds and I am having to dive in and clean a lot of processes up. I need a job where it's more strategic, where I could really focus on the big picture. And I actually let her know, like, it's not the job actually, it's you, it's your focus area. It's you prioritizing pressure and performance over other things that might feel scary, that might feel bigger picture, that may, if you allowed yourself to play with more, you could grow in those skills.
Oftentimes we put these thoughts in our way that it is the environment around us, but really it's us putting the pressure on ourselves and it's saying that we need to be in the weeds because I will also tell you this there's a lot of people who have these big strategic jobs, and they carry around the same issues.
They're still diving into the weeds because they have a hard time letting go of things that they feel that they have high standards over. And it does feel scary to play in a bigger way when your focus is at a higher level, if it's at a strategic level and you're having to play with the leadership team in a way that you haven't been in the past, that could feel scary.
For example, I was very used to doing budgets, the financial planning all of the sort of financial pieces. And that was like my wheelhouse that was my expertise. It was easy for me to do that stuff. It was still hard, right? There's still a lot of things to do but it wasn't until I gave that stuff to my team, stepped away from perfectionism, allowed myself less pressure, and said they can handle it. It really allowed me to have space to play in a bigger way, really building and creating relationships with other senior leaders, my peers and those above me to shift things, to do things more strategically.
But I had to give myself permission to do that, to shift from doing all the day-to-day in the weed stuff to doing this other piece that is actually way more about who I am being in the moment versus what I am doing in the moment. So the power of play is really about being versus doing. And at the highest levels of leadership, this being able to be present to hear what is going on around you, to read the room, to think creatively, to think out of the box.
These are the skills that really matter at that high level of leadership. It's not about the technical expertise of all the things. You can hire people for that, But the ability to go all in, go to a meeting and be creative, be risky, be messy, this is really the power of play. And it can unlock for you lots of creative thinking, lots of ability to share what really matters and what you see as important, but you have to give yourself that permission to play. Otherwise you're gonna be stuck in the same loops that you've been stuck in.
And like I always tell my clients, pressure and perfectionism got you this far, but it won't get you to that next level. This is really about presence, progress, and that happens when you allow yourself to play.
All right, I'm going to share one more study that is from Stanford University, and it showed that participants who engage in playful activities increase their creative output by 60% when compared to groups using more rigid methods. So even for you to like play at work, what could that look like for you?
I just wanted to give an example of me and my team. One of the things that I would do with them during budget season is we would come together, we would do these like 30 minute chunks of time where we're like all share what we're working on. Then we would go and do it. Sometimes it's separately, sometimes it's together. Then we'd come back together and just share what we did.
And it was almost like a game that we played where we were getting to play and interact with each other, but also get stuff done and then go back to do what we need to do, take our little breaks that we needed to. But it made everything much more fun and it made things feel like you are part of a team and you could be creative and it helped people think about different ways of doing stuff.
It's really using a lot of different parts of our brains that instead of just ticking boxes, we're actually engaging in a process that we know that we can improve, that we're feeling energized, feeling productive, and we're actually making lots of progress along the way versus feeling like it's super heavy. I also give the example or the metaphor of climbing a mountain.
We can either push each other along, be really sluggish, be really grumpy, feel like we've got to push it so hard and we're freaked out if it rains or something because we're so focused on this perfect hike versus allowing ourselves to play and engage. And if it rains, we're going to choose to play. We're going to be in it. We might splash a little, slip a little. We are climbing up this mountain together, we're having fun, we're high-fiving each other.
And I just want to give you that visual because oftentimes we don't even realize that we have been in this cycle of perfectionism and pressure until we feel burnt out, until we feel like, I don't even want to go to work the next day, or I'm not looking forward to this thing at all. You will notice that buildup versus if you allowed yourself to play.
And what I would do for people who are just very new to this idea is do something small. I wanna share a few practical tips with you that you can take into your day-to-day so that you can start practicing this play and shift away from this pressure and perfectionism and shift more towards progress and being present.
So number one, recognize when perfection or pressure is holding you back. You want to notice, check in with yourself, how am I feeling? How am I feeling about this task? How am I feeling about going to this meeting? You want to notice if you're very heavy in thinking and feeling like there is a big mountain to climb, an uphill battle. This is your opportunity to notice that perfectionism, that pressure, and this is your opportunity to shift to curiosity and play. Asking yourself, how could this be fun or different? Rather than aiming for perfectionism.
One of the mantras that I like to share with my clients is, if it ain't fun, I'm not doing it. So the question for you is to how to make it fun because obviously there's things that we have to do that don't feel fun, but how do you make it fun? How can you engage in this activity in a fun way? And even if it's a leadership team meeting, you can choose to take yourself there and have more fun with it.
Maybe you're gonna show up early, maybe you show up with your favorite drink, maybe you just allow yourself to stretch ahead of time in the meeting, before the meeting, you know, to get yourself, your body revved up, right? You wanna think about it is like, when in your life do you feel present and playful and how can you recreate that, but in the workplace?
So using those questions to ask yourself, how can I make this more fun? How can I make this more enjoyable? I actually had a yoga teacher who I remember during our, we were doing some very complicated position and he had said, you know, you could ask yourself even when you're doing this very complicated, very difficult position is, how can I make this enjoyable for myself? You know, just asking yourself that question. And it doesn't mean changing all the circumstances around you, it could just be something simple in your mind to say, I'm gonna think about this in a different way, or I'm gonna just like give myself more grace.
So you wanna have that playfulness with yourself, and you wanna have that relationship with yourself where you're noticing, am I having fun? Am I giving myself breaks? And I want you to celebrate small wins. Even if it's you going into the meeting and noticing yourself more curious, asking a question that you might have not asked before, getting more eye contact. Maybe you haven't fully moved away from a full script presentation, but you have less of that. Or at the beginning of the presentation, you open it up to a bigger question for everyone.
You want to be integrating these things and noticing and celebrating these small wins and not dwell on the imperfections. Because here, this is what people that are really perfectionists do. They're like, I didn't play, I didn't play well enough. It was too messy. And we're not allowing you to do that. We are celebrating the wins. We're celebrating even you being a more messy, imperfect version of yourself, but enjoying yourself.
I want you to think about this as a way of being and how you can actually use the power of play to really amp up your presence. Because what really happens, like all these studies are showing, is that when we're present and we're playful, we make more progress. We make way more progress and we enjoy it more. And we're less susceptible to being burnt out from the pressure, from feeling like you have to be perfect.
So I want you to go out there, permission to play. Let me know how this works for you. Try it on, see how it feels. And I wanna hear from you. Feel free to connect with me directly on LinkedIn, leave a review of this episode if it's hit you and you have learned some new skills, but really introducing this power of play and allowing yourself to expand your leadership in this way.
All right, well, that is the episode for today and I want to encourage you to go out and play all out, play hard. I will see you in next week's episode. We've got a big episode coming up, and I'm excited to see you there. Have a great rest of your week.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
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