[175] Climate play – with Lucy Hawthorne

Climate and play might not be two things that we naturally put together. And even less so, climate and 'playfulness'. Climate change is a huge, overwhelming, complext issue and i couldn't be more important. So we need to take this seriously and absolutely need to be bringing our best game, there's no room for messing around, right?
Maybe not!
I loved this chat with the brilliant Lucy Hawthorne, founder of Climate Play who is "making it safe, light and fun to face climate change". Lucy runs a range of workshops and programmes that help people work through emotions, information and actions associated with climate change. In this episode we discuss playfulness as a mindset and why that's so important when it comes to tackling big, serious issues like climate change.
You might think that Climate Play workshops, especially ones involving Lego are aimed at children, but that's very much not the case here - Lucy's workshops are for grown ups, and often grown ups working in proper grown up jobs in proper grown up companies. We talk about the importance of play, especially for adults - how it expands our minds, and puts us into a great, positive frame of mind, meaning we're at our best when attempting to tackle such big and complex issues as climate change. 
There was a phrase that Lucy used at one point during the conversation - something like using play to 'put a softer edges on things to be able to have the harder conversations' that really struck me. I know that I can get very caught up in the importance of this work and the pressure I put on myself to get it right, because so much is at stake. That can mean that I'm potentially pretty intense when I attempt any conversations around climate change and climate action! Allowing ourselves (myself) to experiment and be more playful with what works and what doesn't, letting go of a fear of failure, because we can't fail as we're just experimenting and trying some stuff out, is such an important mindset shift, and one that I'm going to try and embrace. Along with the idea of embracing and doing more of the things that bring us joy, and thinking about how we can do more of what we do with a (genuine!) smile on our faces. 
And speaking of big mindset shifts, look out for the brilliant one right at the end, where Lucy shares the power of simply swapping one simple word in our vocabulary, and how that can make us "more motivated, more likely to carry on doing it (climate action), and more likely to be smiling while I'm doing it."