Accelerating Learning & Innovation Through Play

 “Play is not a luxury but rather a crucial dynamic of healthy, physical, intellectual, and social-emotional development at all ages.” David Elkind, author, The Power of Play: Learning What Comes Naturally.

Accelerating yourself starts with an awareness of your passion and purpose and imaging an inspiring future while being curious, asking good questions, prototyping, testing, and learning as you play.

Accelerating yourself requires you experiment and risk with the high return of learning and creating changes that are desirable in the marketplace. To create shifts large and small in yourself, your team, and in the market requires us to look at our ‘inner game’ that drives and motivates us. This inner game sometimes holds us back. Did you know that annually more and more adults report anxieties, fears, and negative beliefs hold limit them from achieving their goals and that 41.4% of those with anxiety disorders engage with video games as a way to remove stress and negative blocks?

Female founders are activating their career and venture plans with the help of great mentors in the UTS Female Founder Mentoring program.

These founders have been on a journey toward their passions and purpose and have learned important lessons for success, such as how to:

1. Appreciate their mindset and their ‘inner game’ and to begin to align their ‘inner game’ with their passion, purpose, and power to change themselves, their team and the marketplace
2. Activate their sense of play and adventure which inspires and propels them forward
3. Advocate for a mission and vision for the future that is bigger than themselves
4. Amplify their hope and resilience not only for themselves and for others around them
5. Advance their careers and ventures by focusing on innovation and impact

Sinay Salomon is the founder and CEO of aXonPlay. Sinay and her team and stakeholders improve the lives of people living on the Autism Spectrum and those with social anxieties through the design and delivery of fun and engaging digital games and content.

Sinay appreciates that mindsets matter as we approach complex problems and she has activated her sense of play, encouraging her team and those that she serves to “make everyday fun!” and she puts this motto into action at aXonPlay where the team develops products that gamify your life. She advocates for her mission, solving complex problems using deep tech as she strives to create an inclusive society that provides the right resources for people who need them most. Sinay and her team build hope and resilience as they amplify their brand and design games that prepare their customers to live thriving and vibrant lives. aXonPlay regularly conducts research on game design and how gamification can advance learning and applies these insights into innovative technologies and high-impact experiences for her customers.

Sinay has been working with her mentor, Imogen Aitken, National Manager, Program Development, Starlight Children’s Foundation of Australia on how to develop a team environment that enables passion, purpose, and play while also meeting critical milestones for product development. Sinay has learned how to enable team members to appreciate diversity and the bandwidth of needs of her customers. With Imogen’s guidance she has activated a culture that facilitates play and performance. Sinay enables her team to advocate for their own needs as product designers and the needs of their customers to design play that can aid adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to learn and cope with social anxiety and improve their social interactions. Sinay has amplified her team’s sense of discovery and adventure as a means of addressing design challenges. Her mentor has assisted her in advancing her career and venture ambitions.  

The UTS Female Founder Mentoring Program is deploying a 5-step roadmap to successful learning and venture development called Accelerate You! This program starts with deeply appreciating your strengths and moves on to other learning steps that call founders to dig deeply, building their mindsets, confidence, courage, and capacity to learn as they experiment with new strategies. This process of building the inner game includes removing the blocks (negative beliefs or emotions that hold us back), building resilience and opening access to resources. A key lesson is learning to self-advocate and ask for advice or support. This is a mentee-driven process. The mentors support the founders each step of the way. Progress is a function of the founders' ability to clarify their intent and their willingness to persist through the learn-fail-learn-grow cycle. Achieving a sense of confidence and 'lift' is linked the founders' ability to visualize her future career, her future as a founder, and the future of her team or company. Persisting through this learning cycle is essential to building a strong inner game. In this case, Sinay has made learning fun, which accelerates the innovations in her team and their scaleup process.

If you would like to meet Sinay and other female founders and their mentors in action and to hear the stories of their successes and challenges on their journeys, join us at our next female founder session, February 25th at 4:00 pm AEDT https://utsmeet.zoom.us/j/85944274882.  

If you would like more information about the female founder program or Accelerate You! contact, Jeri Childers at [email protected].

Jeri Childers is a founder, leadership and venture development coach, researcher, author, speaker and career futurist. Jeri founded the UTS Techcelerator Program, the UTS Female Founder Mentoring Program and the Advancing Women in Tech Program. Jeri is the CEO and Founder of Jeri Childers Coaching & Leadership Development, Providing coaching & development services to leaders, entrepreneurs, learning designers, R&D professionals & small business owners who are inventing the future. Dr. Childers is a Fellow with the University of Technology Sydney, School of Leadership & Professional Practice, Faculty of Engineering & Information Technology.