If data shows that having fun is critical to our health and wellbeing – and it does – why do we often relegate it to weekends, special occasions and sporadic occurrences Maybe it’s because play time is in constant competition with productivity? It’s time to flip the script on having fun. Here’s why you should make more time for play, along with three easy steps for putting intention into action. I promise the benefits will ripple across the different areas of your personal and professional life.

Engaging your team’s creative prowess is key to unlocking new ideas and uncovering solutions. To help them get there, your workshop design should include activities that encourage people to feel empowered when drawing, or suss out if an idea is worth exploring further, or get unstuck when new or different ideas just aren’t coming naturally. Here are three sketching exercises I like to use for design workshops, and that you can borrow for your next session.

Most of us have participated in a brainstorm before: ideas bounce around the room, every option is captured, and the output is a big list of possibilities. So, how do you narrow down the prospects to identify the most viable ideas that will actually move the needle for your business? I came up with my own formula to tackle this challenge, which I’m breaking down here in hopes it helps your teams find clarity sooner, and identify the best solution to the problem at hand.

What kicks off a day of collaborative work on a good note? How do you create a sense of camaraderie amongst colleagues or perfect strangers? The truth is simple: icebreakers. I know there’s a perception that they’re old school, or fluffy, or even cheesy. But that’s only if you aren’t using them correctly. Here are three common scenarios in which icebreakers are particularly helpful, along with specific examples so you can copy and paste them into your next session.

Defensive thinking stops new ideas in their tracks, or from ever even getting off the ground. It also requires a lot of intention and finesse to mitigate. However, doing so is critical to peeling away a rigid mindset that could be blocking your team members, workshop participants and meeting attendees from their greatest ideas. Here’s how.

If you lead workshops and Design Sprints, you’ll need to involve key decision makers in the process so that it’s constructive rather than disruptive. Having a formula to handle these situation is especially important when working with big orgs. Check out my approach to the process so that your experience feels constructive and controlled.

At what point do our beloved routines become creativity suckers? Doing the same thing day in and day out is great for managing risk, but it often comes at a cost to innovation, originality, and stimulation. Whether you’re seeking a personal or professional burst of creativity, these three tips offer accessible ways to refresh your outlook and attitude.

I can’t help but draw on my experience as a facilitator to examine how the methods I use when leading Design Sprints and workshops might be helpful in navigating life with a child, and creating more communication pathways for us. I’ve found a handful of things work really well for our family and give our daughter more agency to participate in creating plans, communicate with us, and keep us present with one another.

There’s something adults can learn from kids to allow us to explore and create more freely. These three behaviors are worth taking note of, and might pay dividends personally and professionally.

Using tested tools and frameworks takes the guesswork out of the “how” and provides a recipe to follow. But they aren’t enough. You can have the best hammer and nails but if you are too afraid to swing the hammer and make the birdhouse because it might be ugly, you’ll just have a pile of tools and no place for birds to live. When we create, we bring something new into the world. Fear arises when we think about doing anything new. New is unknown. New is novel. New is scary. Our brains want us to stay in the safe zone.

If you don’t decide to try new things, you stay where you are today. This may be safe for a period of time but not forever. Change is necessary. To change, you must decide, commit and act on that.

To stay relevant in today’s rapidly changing marketplace you must change. ‘Adapt or die’ in evolutionary terms. If you stay the same or move too slow, you put your business at risk of not being here in the future.

Every time we have an interaction with another person we are creating a unique exchange that lives outside of the space that those individuals inhabit. When we have a choice about who we create with (meaning, they aren’t our blood relatives) we choose the people who provide us something good; something that makes our life more pleasurable or easier than it would be without the exchange.