Frustration Activities Intentional Learning: WISDOM GAMES
Last week’s Weekly Wisdom Experience installed new emotional reactions to making mistakes. We converted frustration into mindful self observation and curious learning. It is only failure if you don’t keep learning and trying something new.
This personal practice created a great quick change in most of our participants. But at the Weekly Wisdom Game we believe in stacking multiple realities one on top of the other so that while people are learning from one game, another subconscious game is also being demonstrated and practiced.
Participants played a round-robin version of the children’s card game Memory or Concentration where you win by remembering and turning over two cards that are the same number value. If the cards match you (or your team) gets to keep the trick so that once all the cards are collected it is easy to tell who learned the fasted and had the best memory.
It’s a simple game with lots of easy fun. But we juiced it up a bit by playing as teams and supporting one another with positive and corrective reinforcement. When people turned over cards that didn’t match, their teams reinforced that it is okay to make a mistake by enthusiastically saying “Great Learning!” and patting their mate on the back or giving them the fist bump or high-five or thumbs up. This set a tone of excited playful positivity.
When a teammate turned over two cards that matched you can just imagine how excited the verbal encouragement got. “Way to go!” “Awesome job!” “Now we are rolling!”
While this was an exaggerated experience to help people install these new habits of positive reinforcement through repetition and emotion, this is the sort of reinforcement that most of us long for in our teams at work and in our home life too.
Apply It to Your Life
Imagine how responsive your spouse might be if you cheered them on when they tried new experiments. A little crazy playfulness helps keep your relationship fresh. We all like to know that we are loved enough that making mistakes is not going to break the relationship. Positive reinforcement for learning reframes what normally would be a frustrating experience. If we let the frustration gets too high, we usually just give up. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly and correcting until we get the good results we desire.
The thing to remember about reinforcement is that it shapes behavior best if it is:
- positive,
- immediate, and
- gets the person to experience a happy enjoyable emotion.
We rarely need more punishment because as adults we already know how to do too much of that for ourselves.
Helping others to celebrate learning when things don’t go well and celebrate success when they do is a quick way to build stronger friendships at work and help the team learn positive habits of interaction that lead to more successful results. Who doesn’t want that?
If you like embodying wisdom in fun and playful ways, we would love to have you join us next Saturday if you live close to the Central Valley of Costa Rica. http://WisdomGameCR.com If not, consider how you can find a fun way to practice giving supportive feedback and reinforcement this week. Knowing is not enough, only practice makes progress.
