Ep 92 Play Expert Jeff Harry

“The opposite of play is perfection”: Jeff Harry, positive play coach, on using play to navigate hard conversations and relationships, the inspirational power of boredom, and why the pandemic is the perfect time to connect with your inner goofball.

The post Ep 92 Play Expert Jeff Harry appeared first on Midlife Mixtape .

“The opposite of play is perfection”: Jeff Harry, positive play coach, on using play to navigate hard conversations and relationships, the inspirational power of boredom, and why the pandemic is the perfect time to connect with your inner goofball.

Find Jeff Harry on the web:

Website: RediscoverYourPlay.com
Instagram: @jeffharryplays
Twitter: @jeffharryplays
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-harry-6991a94/
Medium: @jeffharryplays
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/jchuche
TikTok: @jeffharryplays

Thanks to our sponsor, AmateurMusic.org/workshops!
Join us Thursday, March 4 at 5 pm PT, 8 pm ET for an Alternative ’80s Dance Party – Midlife Mixtape and San Francisco’s iconic Cat Club are hanging out on Twitch at https://www.twitch.tv/dj_damon !

You betta kill it. YOU BETTA KILL IT

Thanks as always to M. The Heir Apparent, who provides the music behind the podcast – check him out here! ***This is a rough transcription of Episode 92 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. It originally aired on March 2, 2021. Transcripts are created using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and there may be errors in this transcription, but we hope that it provides helpful insight into the conversation. If you have any questions or need clarification, please email [email protected] ***

Jeff Harry 00:00

This is not about you. This is about you doing it to give permission for other people to start to show up.

Nancy Davis Kho 00:08

Welcome to Midlife Mixtape, The Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho and we’re here to talk about the years between being hip and breaking one.

[THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent]

Nancy 00:33

Hi, listeners. In today’s episode, you’ll hear a LOT of talk about dancing and dance floors and just tearing it up to great music. If that makes you wish you could hit the club, there’s good news! It’s time for another Alternative ‘80s virtual dance party with Midlife Mixtape and San Francisco’s iconic Cat Club! This Thursday night, March 4th, DJ Damon will be playing your favorite Alt-80s dance hits on his Twitch channel for two hours, starting at 5 pm Pacific, 6 Mountain, 7 Central, and 8 pm Eastern. All you have to do at the appointed time is go to twitch.tv/dj_damon. That’s twitch.tv/dj_damon – don’t worry, I’ll leave a link in the show notes – and you’ll be at the party along with Bowie, Violent Femmes, the Clash, and more.

Turn your speakers ALL the way up and dance wherever you’re listening! There’s a chat function on Twitch and I’ll be hanging out there starting at 5 o’clock so I hope you’ll drop in and say hello. Lesson learned from when we did this back in December – if you’re going to use an alias in Twitch, at least give me a clue so I know who I’m chatting back to!

Damon and I have also decided that as long as we have some cool people like you together for a little dance party on Thursday night, we’ll try to do some good – we’re hoping you’ll make donations to Bay Area food banks, or food banks where you live, if you hear a song you love! During the dance party, I’ll drop links into the Twitch chat to make the donations to Bay Area organizations easy. So bring your song requests on Thursday – I hope you’ll join in for a single song or for a couple of hours. That’s Thursday, March 4th at 5 pm Pacific, 8 pm Pacific at twitch.tv/dj_damon. I will see you there!

[MUSIC]

Hey Slackers, it’s me, Nancy Davis Kho, creator and host of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast and author of The Thank-You Project: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time. My book got a little shout out in the New York Times over the weekend, what a thrill! Thanks to everyone who’s still spreading the word about the book, which helps readers understand how gratitude letters can change the way you view the world for the better, and it gives you tools to get started on thanking the people who have helped, shaped, and inspired you.

I hope you are all hanging in there and that at least some of you have gotten your vaccines – just think, with every episode, that many more listeners will be protected and we’re that much closer to getting back to seeing the people we love and not to mention hanging out at restaurants, concerts, and bars with a shit-ton of strangers. I can’t wait!

Today we’re going to talk about play, which may seem entirely counterintuitive during a pandemic. It did to me and that is actually the exact reason why I invited today’s guest on the show. I figured if we walked away from this episode knowing how to incorporate more play in our lives during a pandemic, think of how much easier that will be AFTER herd immunity.

I’m talking today with positive play coach Jeff Harry. Jeff 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 and SXSW, showing audiences how major issues in the workplace can be solved using play. Jeff was selected by BambooHR & Engagedly as one of the Top 100 HR Influencers of 2020 for his organizational development work around dealing with toxic people in the workplace. Jeff has also been featured on AJ+, the San Francisco Chronicle, and CNN. His play work has most recently been featured in the NY Times article: How Do We Add More Play To Our Grown-Up Life – Even Now.

Jeff believes that by simply unleashing our inner child, we can find our purpose and, in turn, help to create a better world. So let’s jump into the midlife sandbox with Jeff Harry.

[MUSIC]

Nancy 04:10

Welcome to the Midlife Mixtape Podcast, Mr. Jeff Harry, how are you?

Jeff 04:14

I’m so excited for this.

Nancy 04:16

I’m so excited about this too. We’ve got to lay a little groundwork here for a level-set for our listeners. The first question we always ask on this show: what was your first concert and what were the circumstances?

Jeff 04:28

It was Smokin’ Grooves concert in Chicago.

Nancy 04:33

What the heck is that, Smokin’ Grooves?

Harry 04:35

Yeah, it was all these hip-hop artists back in the 90s like Gang Starr and Busta Rhymes and it was just all dudes on stage, all dudes off stage. It was very testosterone centric, and a lot of swaying back and forth, but not in that happy way, but in more of an angry way, like, what am I doing here?

Nancy 05:06

How old were you?

Jeff 05:08

I was like 16, 17 years old. I thought I was so cool to go and then when I was there, I was like, I don’t like this at all.

Nancy 05:17

“There’s a lot of testosterone floating around in this room.”

Jeff 05:19

Exactly. I was like, “Where are…I’m not attracted to any of you, I’m sorry.”

Nancy 05:24

Well, it’s funny because Jeff, you and I have seen each other many times over the years at this Mom 2.0 conference, almost always on the dance floor. Almost always, we are spastically dancing past each other going “Woooo, Warriors! Oakland!” Because we both share our love of the Warriors and our Oakland roots.

Jeff 05:45

BAY AREA!

Nancy 05:46

So I can’t imagine you being grim at a concert. Or really in any setting.

Jeff 05:51

I know.

Nancy 05:52

As I was thinking about having you on the show today, I wondered, we’re going to talk a lot about play and unlocking people’s silliness and letting people relax. What part does music and dance play in that? Do you use that as one of your tools for helping people loosen up?

Jeff 06:10

Oh, absolutely. I mean, if you think about it, you and I are the people that start the dance floor, right? Like, at weddings.

Nancy 06:13

Always.

Jeff 06:14

We don’t care. I’ve been thinking about this, that I now believe the opposite of play is perfection. And perfection is rooted in shame, and you really can’t play when you feel shame. So the people that I love dancing with the most are the shameless, are the people that don’t really care. I’m out here for me. I don’t care if you want to dance or not. We usually are the first ones on the dance floor and then as soon as the dance floor actually gets packed, then we’re like, Our job is done. It’s not fun anymore. Because we are all about the start of it, and the exploration of it and being like, wait, what type of energy can we create in the room?

Nancy 07:01

Do you know… I was at my 30th College reunion, so, Ivy League, East Coast, pretty buttoned up. And they had a great DJ and was anybody dancing? No! Finally, the president of the class, who is a Wall Street mover and shaker – very nice woman, but I think we probably exchanged four words, all of our time in college… she walked straight over to me and said, “Could you please get this started?” I said, “I have been waiting for that request. Yes.” I went to the DJ and said, “Play this, play this, play this” and yeah, BAM! Everybody was out dancing. We know how to do it.

Jeff 07:36

You may need that person.

Nancy 07:39

Yeah, you do.

Jeff 07:40

There is even a video of this guy at this festival randomly in Portland dancing and making a fool out of themselves for 10 minutes and people are laughing. They’re mocking him. They’re filming him. But then all of a sudden, two people join. And they start dancing, and they were mocking him. But he didn’t care. He was just fully in it and then more people joined and more people joined and then now it’s this viral video where he’s surrounded by 200 people and they were like, this is an example of how you can create a movement. It’s in that same way of the first person that is willing to be out there, scorned, ridiculed, and is still doing it.

I even remember when… I haven’t shared this that much. When I used to go to this New Year’s Eve party at the Four Seasons in Chicago with my parents. I don’t know why we went to this foofoo party. But each year it was my sisters and me that started the dancing. And they started asking for us! It was like, I should get paid to do this!

Nancy 08:46

Have you seen this TikTok? It’s an older black guy sitting in an office and he’s just in the corner cubicle doing his work. And somebody comes in and starts playing Everybody Dance Now and the guy is just like, this is the moment that I’ve been waiting for. If I can figure out how to put that with the show notes, I will, because that to me is the heart of what you do. This guy is sitting there, he’s working and then suddenly, there is so much joy that he cannot sit in his desk, and he’s doing the Everybody Dance Now. And he’s good too, by the way, he is a really good dancer. I must have watched it 90 times in a row because it was just delightful.

Jeff 09:22

He does it in every place. He does it in grocery stores. He does it in hotels and it’s the same audio. It’s just, “Don’t you do it! Don’t you do it!” He’s like, “Oh yeah. I gotta do it!”

Nancy 09:36

Let’s talk about the work that you do. We’re going to start at the very beginning. What is it that you as a play specialist do and through your work with Rediscover Your Play, how do you get us to connect with our inner silliness, our inner sense of joy?

Jeff 09:51

Maybe it’s better if I start with my Batman origin story as the way to get there. Do you remember the movie Big, with Tom Hanks?

Nancy 10:00

Yes, of course.

Jeff 10:01

I saw that and he danced on that piano and got offered a job to work for a toy company and as soon as I saw that, I was like, you can do that as a job? I was in third grade so I started writing toy companies that day on my word processor. That dates me, right? I kept writing toy companies. I would get a lot of rejection letters back. Then finally a toy company software told me to go into mechanical engineering. They went out of business later. Maybe I shouldn’t have listened to them…but I did and I went to Tufts, got into mechanical engineering, and then graduated and got in the toy industry.

I don’t know if you’ve ever gotten exactly what you’ve wanted, and then been so disappointed when you get there? But there were no toys, no fun, no high fives, I was in a cubicle. Why do they pad the walls? I don’t understand!  It was not fun at all and I’m at a toy company.

So I left, had my quarter life crisis, left New York, came to the Bay Area, bumped into an organization that I found on Craigslist and there were only seven people at the time teaching kids engineering with Lego, and they were just playing for a living and there were seven of them. They were paying $150 a week. But I was like, oh, they get to play. I can make this work. I’ll figure it out, right? I was able to grow it into one of the largest Lego-inspired STEM organizations in the US, if not the largest, where we were teaching 100,000 kids a year.

And the whole time we did this, we had no idea what we were doing. We were playing. We picked cities we thought were fun. We picked people we thought were fun. We had no business plan. We experimented all the time. We’re like, Oh, that doesn’t work. Well, let’s try that! and then we eventually got the attention of Silicon Valley, Facebook, Google, Adobe. They asked, “Do you do team building events?” We’re like, “Of COURSE we do!” NO WE DIDN’T. We had never done that in our lives. We were like, “Yes, we do it all!”

Nancy 12:03

“We do now!”

Jeff 12:04

I ended up running team building events for the top tech companies in the world for the next decade and what I noticed while I was doing all this is they would speak about disruption, collaboration, communication, pushing the envelope, all these buzzwords. But they weren’t doing any of it. Even as the best organizations, they have not created psychologically safe spaces for people to actually take risks and play. So I created Rediscover Your Play to combine positive psychology and play to help them navigate hard conversations through play, to talk about toxicity at work, to talk about how do you deal with your inner critic and imposter syndrome, to talk about how to get your staff in flow all using a play-oriented mindset.

Nancy 12:52

What do the workshops look like? Do you come in on site for a day? Now especially during the pandemic, how are you delivering all that programming?

Jeff 13:01

Yeah, a lot of this stuff, we’ve now been able to move online. I ran a workshop called… I don’t know if I can swear on this podcast?

Nancy 13:09

Of course, I took the E [for explicit] early on in my podcast life.

Jeff 13:15

Excellent. So I run a workshop for the Department of Homeland Security called Dealing with A-Holes at Work Through Play. That was one of the workshops.

Nancy 13:24

Which one of those words were you worried I was going to bleep out? A-hole? It’s not even the whole word.

Jeff 13:30

Ok, dealing with assholes. But that is literally the title of one of our workshops, because we realized that the eradication of a-holes is necessary. I think SHRM did a study and found that $223 billion was lost in the last five years due to toxic people. So that’s one of the workshops we do where we actually have people role play and practice, how do you confront that a-hole? How do you have that hard conversation?

Because if you think about work, we never get to practice at work. You think of a football game, they practice all week for three hours. But when we’re at work, we’re just expected to work and produce all the time and we never get to practice navigating a hard conversation, addressing how to be a leader, figuring out how to deal with my inner critic like all these things. So I set up these workshops to actually put people in situations where they feel what they’re actually going to feel when they leave this and it gives them the bravery to take bigger steps.

Nancy 14:30

Are there people in your workshops who are super skeptics? Because work is not generally a place where we think we are going to be rewarded for being silly.  I think a lot of us tend to be a little protective of ourselves. We don’t want to make fools of ourselves in front of the people who have the power to promote and demote and pay us.

Jeff 14:49

Yeah, absolutely. There are definitely skeptics and the thing is, I hate forced fun. I HATE it. I run team building events. I’m not trying to force anyone to play when they’re not there. I actually treat it more like a playground where I’m like, “Hey, this is the project or the thing that we’re doing right now, if you want to participate, great. If you don’t, you can just hang out on the sidelines, like we’re in a playground and if you want to join in later, then feel free to.”

The reason why partly why I say that is because the people are like, “Well, why is play necessary at work? It’s not necessary right now.” I always reference Steven Johnson, who said, “You’ll find the future where people are having the most fun.”

If you look at the organizations that are thriving right now, the TikTok, Clubhouse, Disney+, Netflix, all these organizations, the ones that are willing to take risks, those are the ones that are thriving, those are the ones that did well in 2020, that were adaptable, that were resilient. That’s all using a play-oriented mindset. But if you choose not to play, if you choose to be like, “Well, I just want to get back to normal and we’re going to do things the way we’ve always done it,” you’re going to become the next Blockbuster.

If you need more examples of why play is so important, look at Google with their 20% program.

They give their staff a fifth of their time to pursue whatever suits their curiosity, as long as it helps out Google. In that process, what has come from the Google 20% program? AdSense, which pays the bills, Google Meet. And Gmail. Those are all curious play projects people had on the side.

For businesses, they may not be able to give a fifth of their time, but they can help their staff figure out like, what is your flow work? What is your red thread work? What’s the work where you forget about time? What’s the work that even if you weren’t getting paid you would do this type of work? What percentage of time are you currently spending on that type of work? 10%? You’re only doing it 10% of the time? How can we increase it to 15 or 20%, which is really only a couple more hours a week. Because studies have shown when you do your flow work, it has a ripple effect on all the other work that you do and your productivity levels go up, your morale goes up, and you’re less likely to leave the organization.

Nancy 17:07

What about beyond an organizational setting? How do we at midlife try to embrace that creativity and that fun? Because generally speaking, midlife isn’t exactly famous for flights of fancy. I mean, we’re balancing our kids, we’re balancing our aging relatives. You mentioned forced fun. Sometimes when I hear about programs like this, my sense is, oh my God! That’s something else I have to do! Another thing on my to-do list, I know I have to have more fun than I’ve been having. So how would you address that concern?

Jeff 17:38

I would first address it by first having compassion for ourselves.

By the time you turn the age of 18, you have heard the word “no” 148,000 times. That’s what one study found. On top of that, you were “should” on by your parents all the time, by your parents, by your school teachers, everyone is shoulding on you. “You should do this! You should do that! You should do that! You should major in this!” And you’re like, “I’m six. Why are you telling me what I should be majoring in right now?”

So everyone’s pushing their anxieties on you. Then you get to your teenage years, especially now with social media, and all this social media and media is telling you you’re not enough, you shouldn’t be yourself and frankly, you actually should be spending more money trying to become somebody else.

So you’re fighting all of that. Then when you try to be your playful self, when you try to be a little bit more mischievous, people say you’re doing too much. “Why are you acting that way? Why would you want to start a podcast? That makes no sense.” People are always questioning you. You have to battle all that just to be able to play and be yourself.

The suggestion I would give people- two suggestions. One is – my play mentor Glen Gordon would always say, “You can’t play until you soothe yourself.” If you’re feeling a lot of anxiety, a lot of anger, a lot of sadness, that’s not the time to play. You actually have to allow yourself to feel those feelings, feel them fully as they talk about in positive psychology, before you let them go. You can’t try to numb them. But actually allow yourself to feel it fully, and once you feel that, then figure out what soothes you. When I take showers, that’s when I have a huge amount of ideas. When I go out on walks, when I’m dancing in my house, sometimes with a costume on. What is the thing that actually calms you down? Is it meditation? Whatever it is that actually calms you to a place where you can actually then receive.

And then I challenge people to do something that most people have not done in a really long time and that is: get bored.

What I mean by that is stop binge-watching Netflix, stop looking at social media –  and I’m not talking about forever. I’m talking about one hour, 30 minutes where you just are not looking at it. If you think, “Well, I don’t have time.” Look at your phone. Your phone counts how long you’ve been on your phone. The average is four hours a day. You can find 30 minutes to an hour to get really bored.

The reason why I say get bored is because think about when you were a kid, when you were bored, that’s when you came up with your best ideas and your most mischievous ideas. And then you’re like, Oh, man, maybe I should start a podcast, maybe I will make this ridiculous video, maybe I will email this person I’ve always wanted to email like, maybe I’ll do the thing that I’ve always been scared to do, but also kind of excited and see where that curiosity takes you. That is your way in which you could actually play again.

Nancy 20:41

That’s something everybody listening to this show could do. I mean, especially now during the pandemic, if you can’t find 30 minutes to stare into space, when are you going to find it?

Jeff 20:53

Here’s another way in which they can do it.

If you want to employ your friends to help you out, reach out to three to five of your closest friends, get on the phone with them –  I know, it’s kind of foreign –  but get on the phone with them or see them face to face via Zoom, and ask them two questions:

“What value do I bring to your life?” Because I think a lot of times we forget, or maybe we’ve never known ,what value we bring to our friend’s life. What do I do for you? Why are we friends? Why do you keep hanging out with me? What value do I bring to your life?

Then the second question is, “When have you seen me most alive?” Another way of asking this is, “When have you seen me most playful, most creative, most myself?”  This question comes from the Howard Thurman quote, “Don’t ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs is for more people to come alive.” Again, what value do I bring to your life and whenever you see me come most alive? When you get those answers back and you start writing it down and look at all the patterns, there’s so many ways in which you either are already playing or ways in which you can play again and then you could reach back out to those friends and be like, “Can you help me to play more in this way?”

Nancy 22:02

Right. The last episode of the show was with Laura Tremaine who wrote a book called Share Your Stuff. I’ll Go First and it’s all about sort of deep questions you can ask your friends, but you can also reflect on yourself. One of them is, “What were your magical moments?” She encourages us to just think about times in our life that really stand out as those memories you want to carry with you and I realized in prepping for this episode, well, one of my magical places is this family camp that I’ve gone to since I was two up in the Adirondack Mountains in New York.

I still travel back from California to go to that and my siblings, and I, and now our spouses and our kids all stay in the same cabin. We go there with people who we met when we were two, three, and they’re all parents and even grandparents at this point and I think one of the reasons it is so magical to me, is because we all play there.

Jeff 22:58

Yeah.

Nancy 22:59

One of the days that I’ll never forget, this is a couple years ago…there’s a thing out in the middle of the lake, a floating spinner. It’s a big floating donut, basically, with a trampoline in the middle. The lifeguard stands on the trampoline, and you go out with your life jacket on so you’ll be safe. But you get up and stand on this outer rim of the spinner and you try to run around while the lifeguard is going up and down on the trampoline.

Of course, it’s designed for the summer campers. It’s all supposed to be kids, but there was a day –  it was a beautiful sunny day- and I was out there and it was with a bunch of 40, 50, 60 years old people who had grown up at this camp together. We were in hysterics running around this thing, trying to bounce each other off. It was just this pure joy and I could remember what it felt like to be eight years old and having fun, just fun for its own sake.  I realized there’s a reason that stands out to me so much: because it’s isolated. I don’t always have fun. Maybe at midlife, these moments of just fun for its own sake become that much more valuable.

Jeff 24:05

I love that you said that, because the way in which I define plays is very broad. It’s any joyful moment where you are fully present. Where there is no purpose, there is no result. You don’t have anxiety about the future. You don’t have regrets about the past, you are just fully engaged in that present time. One thing I wrote  abut was the Fun Joy Play Index. I replaced resolutions because I don’t believe in resolutions and I was like let’s do a Fun Joy Play Index every year.

At the beginning of every year, look back, and you can do this for 2020, think about what were your most fun, joyful play moments. I asked many questions like, “What was your most awe-inspiring moment? When did you laugh the most? What was just like a moment where you just couldn’t stop smiling?” You just start to reflect and savor those moments again and that’s also a way in which you can not only relive those moments, but actually boost your immune system now, by simply going back and savoring those moments. And then after you’ve recognized all of them be like, What fun joy play moments do I want in 2021? Even if the pandemic is still going on, even if I’m in quarantine, who are the people that I want to be spending more time with and connecting with?

One of my great friends and colleague, Lauren, we were like, “Oh, we need to do more tipsy brainstorms where we have a few mimosas while we brainstorm!” and we scheduled those. There’s something else about anticipation and looking forward to having real, amazing connections. We have to think – at the end of your life, we have to learn from the dying. One of the biggest regrets of the dying is, “I wish I had the courage to live the life that I want to live and not the life that others expected of me.” I think our whole life, we’re trying to think of what is the right way of doing things so that I can collect as many possessions or, whatever, accolades. But no one thinks about that at the end of your life. You think about the Fun Joy Play moments. So why wouldn’t we be spending more time focusing on that?

Nancy 26:20

I wonder if your work has gotten particularly difficult since the pandemic started? Because the facts are that things are so hard for so many of us, we’ve lost people, we’ve lost jobs, we’re worried about our kids, we’re worried about our neighbors.  I wonder if there is a pervasive sense that this is not the time to have fun. This is not appropriate given the environment within which we find ourselves.

Jeff 26:46

In my opinion, I feel like this is the MOST important time to!

Here, I’ll give you this example. When my father passed away in 2015, I was at his funeral, and his brother showed up. His brothers had not seen each other in 20 years since their mom passed away. I’m surrounded by all of them and I’m feeling grief and sadness, but I’m also feeling joy and gratitude that they’re there, that all of my extended family are there. And at first, I was like, “Oh, cannot feel both feelings!” I remembered Inside Out, it was like, you feel all the feelings, you feel all of them at the same time, and you allow them to flow through you. That’s what living is.

I really felt joy and gratitude, not just for them but just for what my dad had done for me at the same time that I was like, I’m so sad that I’m never going to have another conversation with him again. But we should have to allow ourselves to feel all those feelings instead of trying to numb them. I get it if people want to binge watch Netflix to a certain point. But when that binge watching is like almost like eating Cheetos, where you’re starting to feel sick, and you’re like, this is not feeling good for me anymore, then stop doing that and start pursuing something that actually brings you joy.

There is a guy on Clubhouse right now – and for anyone that doesn’t know Clubhouse, it’s this new social media app that’s all audio. He was going into all these rooms and there are all these really popular people, there are all these celebrities. He was like, “This is not the right room for me. I don’t know why I’m on this app, but I’m a musician and I just want to bring happiness to people’s lives.” So he was just like, “I’m just going to create my own room and call it the Lullaby Room and I’m going to play lullaby music at 10,11pm at night for anyone that wants to join.”

Because of the pandemic, it became the most popular room on Clubhouse. It was so popular that they made him the icon on Clubhouse! If you download Clubhouse now, his face is the icon! When people ask why he did it, he was just like, “I was just pursuing the thing that brought me the most joy.” We’re only on this planet for a certain period of time, so why wouldn’t we be devoted to pursuing that and even in times of grief, still feeling joy and gratitude, I think, is essential for living.

Nancy 29:16

I’m glad you brought up that example of your dad’s funeral because, as you know… you were so kind to me when we had to reschedule this after my mom died in December. I had a very similar experience at my dad’s funeral, where the grief that was heavy and real was side by side with such joy at seeing people. My cousins came out of the woodwork, and you know, I have a funny family. I just do. It’s the man’s legacy. And so there were moments of utter hilarity during my dad’s funeral.

When mom died in December, and I couldn’t get back there – we’ve postponed her memorial, we’ll do that sometime this summer –  a big part of my feeling of loss was that I couldn’t get the fun part of it. I could see it –  I was watching [her burial] on Zoom as my cousins and my siblings and nieces and nephews were all there in New York and I was so sad because I thought, oh, I’m going to miss out on the camaraderie and the joy of being together that also is a part of this particular kind of grief. And then I remembered because of the pandemic, they all had to go to their separate houses.

So we’ll find that together next summer, but I absolutely relate to what you’re saying. It’s not disrespectful to feel moments of joy within loss and within difficult times. I do think it’s part of how you get through them.

Jeff 30:37

I think it’s also part of the celebration process of that person’s life.

Nancy 30:40

Right.

Jeff 30:41

I want my funeral to be a party, man! I mean, it should be a celebration. One of my favorite memories of last year was these conversations I had with my friend Lauren and my friend, Julie, where we would talk about death. We talked about death for hours and it was something fascinating about how most people avoid this, but we found by actually talking about it, by actually exploring it, we understood more of what we wanted to do in our lives and live right now. Because when you truly do understand death, then you truly do know how to live more.

Nancy 31:19

The stakes get a lot higher when you know that it’s coming to an end, when you admit to yourself that you don’t have infinite time.

Jeff, where’s the best place for people to go to find your work and tune in to more of what you’re doing with Rediscover Your Play?

Jeff 31:33

Simply go to rediscoveryourplay.com and click on the Let’s Play button where I have a bunch of play activities and you can then hop on a call with me and figure out how you can kick ass in this world through play.

Nancy 31:45

There are also photos of you…what grade were you in, fifth grade? It’s a thing of beauty. You had a lot of hair as a young child.

Jeff 31:54

Is that the one with the champagne bottles and the money?

Nancy 31:57

Yes, exactly. You look like you were living your best life. At that point, you’d already been sending letters out to the toy companies. Who wouldn’t want to hire that kid?

Jeff 32:04

That is very funny because that’s when I won bingo in Bermuda as a seven-year-old and let’s just say the other bingo players that had been playing there for quite some time were LIVID that this seven-year-old. had won two champagne bottles and $230. They were like, “What is he even going to do with it?”

Nancy 32:26

We’re going to take a quick break and hear from our sponsor, and then we’ll come back to hear more with Jeff Harry of Rediscover Your Play.

The presenting Sponsor of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast is the Amateur Music Network.

You know what’s a great way to bring more play into your life? Music. It’s not a coincidence that we talk about playing the piano or the guitar. It’s fun!

Our sponsor Amateur Music Network is all about that playful spirit. It’s a Bay Area nonprofit that connects amateur musicians with professional mentors, and with one another, through online workshops, conversations, and listings.

They’re serious—in a playful way, of course—about amateur in their name. “We do it because we love it!” is their motto. Isn’t that what play is all about?

If you’re a singer who’s feeling a little play-deprived these days, let me tell you about Amateur Music Network’s new series, Singing Saturdays with Ragnar Bohlin, which takes place over three Saturdays from March 13th through March 27th.

Ragnar Bohlin is the world-renowned director of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, which has thrilled many audiences and made many glorious recordings. Ragnar has spent the pandemic in his native Sweden but through the magic of Amateur Music Network and Zoom, he’ll be in your living room or your backyard wherever, leading you and other singers from around the world in an hour of focused singing every week. You’ll start with vocal warm-ups and then sing some of the most beautiful choral music ever written—Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and Mahler’s Symphony No. 2.

OK, it can’t replace an in-person choir, and on Zoom nobody can hear you singing. But Ragnar’s unique ability to connect through the screen will have you feeling like you’re getting personal coaching from one of the very best and with Amateur Music Network the focus is always on being together in a community of music-makers, even while we’re apart.

Sign up for Singing Saturdays by going to amateurmusic.org/workshops. That’s amateurmusic.org/workshops and if you don’t sing, but do play a musical instrument, check out Amateur Music Network’s other online workshops. There’s something there for everyone who loves making—and playing—music.

[MUSIC]

Nancy 34:23

Alright. We’re back with Jeff Harry and I wanted to ask you, Jeff… I’m kind of a leading edge Gen Xer and you are the last part of Gen X and I wanted to know, between the bookends, is there anything special about the way Generation X approaches fun and play? Is there kind of a special sensibility that we bring to it?

Jeff 34:43

Gen Xers were before social media. We know what it’s like to actually be told, “Go outside” and then, “Well, I don’t have anything to do.” “So what? Go and come back when it gets dark.”

Nancy 34:59

Boredom is not unfamiliar to our generation. We grew up with it.

Jeff 35:01

I remember my sisters and I would be fascinated looking at a dead fish and trying to squeeze its guts out of it for hours. FOR HOURS.

Nancy 35:13

Raise your hand if you ever sat around with a rock and a roll of caps.

Jeff 35:16

Not to mention we’ve gone through so many different ridiculous, not just presidencies, but so many different disasters. But yeah, so I think we have a really interesting perspective of what it’s like to actually be bored, while also being savvy enough to be part of a lot of the social media that’s happening now.

Nancy 35:38

You’ve mentioned a couple of people as mentors. It sounds like you’ve been really deliberate about that, about putting together a team of people to help keep you on track.

Jeff 35:46

Yeah, it wasn’t like, “I need to find a mentor!” It was just like people that I vibed with. I was like, Let me just spend more time hanging out with this person, because they’re fun! It’s just like being on the dance floor and you’re like, I want to hang out with you. You can feel when there’s not ego in the dance group. When people are dancing for dancing’s sake, and when people are dancing to get attention. I want to be with the people that are just there just because they just love wiggling their body.

Nancy 36:19

What’s next for you as a play expert at midlife? Are you still operating kind of without a plan? Because you sure have created a vision and a path for yourself. What you talked about with the early-stage company, where you guys were just throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks – it has worked for you! But are you still using that process, or do you have a plan now?

Jeff 36:41

I still am using it to a point. I follow my curiosity for the most part, but the overarching vision – I really got inspired by Brené Brown when she was just like, “I want to have a global conversation about vulnerability and shame.” I want to have a global conversation about the power of play to change things.

You could use play to address climate change. You could use play to navigate difficult conversations. I just had a conversation with a Trump supporter, someone that I completely disagree with and it was on her YouTube channel. She had thousands of people watching. And using play, we were able to have a conversation for three hours and find commonality, find a certain level of understanding. It wasn’t all happy at the end of it, but we figured it out. There’s so much healing that needs to happen, mental health, division politically, dealing with stuff like climate change, having more empathy, especially around the pandemic. All of this can be used if you use a play-oriented mindset to actually help people connect on a values level and connects through empathy, instead of through our rational mind which we’re always trying to do.

Nancy 37:54

I hope that all of you will go check out Jeff’s work at rediscoveryourplay.com and Jeff, I hope we’re going to see each other on the dance floor again, IRL, someday soon.

Jeff 38:04

Yes, can I good will hunt your people before we…

Nancy 38:08

I don’t even know what that means but sure, give it a go. They are game for anything.

Jeff 38:13

You remember Good Will Hunting?

Nancy 38:15

Yeah.

Jeff 38:16

So this moment of the movie resonates with me so much.

It’s at the end of the movie at the construction site where Matt Damon is sitting with Ben Affleck – and for anyone that has never seen Good Will Hunting:, Matt Damon’s a genius. He could have any job he wants and right now he’s hanging out at the construction site with Ben Affleck, they’re working construction.

Ben’s like, “What are you going to take one of these high paying jobs?” and Matt says, “I’m not. I’m going to work construction. We’re going to raise our kids together; we’re going to take them to the Foley Field and that’s just what I’m going to do.” Ben turns to him, and he’s like, “If I see you here in 20 years, I’m going to kill you. I’m literally going to kill you.” Matt goes, “What are you talking about? What, I owe it to myself?” Ben says, “No, you don’t owe it to yourself. You owe it to ME. Because I’m going to be here in 20 years and that’s fine. But you’re sitting on a winning lottery ticket and you’re too scared to cash that in.”

I truly believe for all the listeners out there, you ALL are sitting on winning lottery tickets and you’re not trying to cash it in for yourself. This is not about you. This is about you doing it to give permission for other people to start to show up. When you actually do something that’s scary, but exciting, it gives someone bravery to be like, whoa! Maybe I can do that. You starting this podcast is the only reason why I’m now here all these years later!

If there’s one message that I can communicate to your listeners, it is that you have this opportunity, you only have a short time to do it. What are you going to do with the time that you had? Are you going to show up? Because everyone else is waiting for you to show up so they can also be fully alive!

Nancy 40:01

It’s such great advice and I’m so happy to hear you encourage people because yeah, taking that risk is so scary, but the payoff is huge. It’s huge. I’m just seconding everything you said.

Before I let you go, though, we always close with this question: what one piece of advice do you have for people younger than you or do you wish you could go back and tell yourself?

Jeff 40:22

The advice I would tell myself is that nobody knows what they’re doing. If 2020 didn’t show you that… even Brené Brown, Simon Sinek, they didn’t have a clue of what they were doing, either! So nobody knows. That makes you an expert on yourself. Follow your intuition, follow your curiosity. Trust your instincts. Remember that your rational mind, your inner critic is designed to protect you and it’s designed to save you from all the scary things out there. But it’s your intuition, THAT’S where your creativity, that’s where the risk taking, that’s where all the impact is.

So listen to that intuition. Listen to that inner child. Listen to that inner curiosity, and it will take you on an adventure that you’ll never regret.

Nancy 41:16

Wise words. Jeff, thank you so much so much for coming on the show. This is really inspiring. Everybody, Jeff, Harry, rediscoveryourplay.com and Jeff – I’ll see you on a dance floor sometime soon.

Jeff 41:27

Yippy!

Nancy 41:28

Woo-hoo!

[MUSIC]

Ok, I hope it’s ok with you that I gave Jeff permission to “good will hunt” you without knowing what that was or asking if you were ok with it. Generally, I’m down with consent. I think it’s a good thing. But I felt like the worst he was going to do was use a Boston accent. I felt it was worth taking the risk.

I hope today’s show gave you some ideas to chew on. I’d love to hear what you thought – drop me a line at [email protected], or send me a message via Instagram, FB, and Twitter @midlifemixtape. Remember, every rating and review you leave makes it easier for other listeners to find me, so I’m grateful to you for adding your thoughts, wherever you listen!

Remember, in two nights we’re meeting again. Join me on Thursday night for our next virtual Midlife Mixtape Dance Party – go to twitch.tv/dj_damon at 5 pm Pacific!

Ok, here’s your homework before the next episode. Google “Har Mar Superstar videos.” That’s Har, H-A-R, Mar, M-A-R SUPERSTAR – and watch the Prisoner video, or Lady You Shot Me. Follow that rabbit hole ALL the way down. Keep watching those videos and then come back here in two weeks. That’s all I’m saying for now. I’ll catch you then!

[THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent]

 

The post Ep 92 Play Expert Jeff Harry appeared first on Midlife Mixtape .