Creating A Better Life, We Have What It Takes: Lessons from playing with Lego with my son

I was playing with Lego blocks with my son the other day, and had a highly enjoyable and productive time rummaging through a big box of Lego blocks and building whatever was the theme of the moment, ranging from buildings, to spaceships, to boats and lots more.

Amidst all the laughter and fun, I realised there are so many useful things to be learnt from this that perfectly aligned with my coaching practice in helping my clients create a better life and thrive. And so with gratitude to my son here are a three things I learnt from playing with him:

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(1)???Creating a better future starts with an idea of the desired end outcome

The process of building things with Lego always begins with some idea of what we want to end up with. It could a specific goal like “a race car with lots of guns”, or a desired outcome such as “let’s all build planes and then have a battle between them”.

It is really difficult to be fruitful and productive if we simply start off with no thoughts whatsoever on the end goal or outcome and simply mash blocks together. We would not even know which blocks to select and begin with, should it be the long piece or the square one? The red block or the black one?

When we want to create a better life for ourselves, this also applies. We need to have an idea, no matter how vague, on the type of life we might like or a goal to work towards. Just mashing together a whole bunch of activities every day with no idea on our desired goal or outcome is simply busy work. We feel occupied and busy, but we are simply mashing things together rather than building something specific that contributes to a better life.

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(2)???Work with what you have

The whole idea behind playing with Lego is about simply using whatever building blocks are at hand to build whatever you can. If you can’t find a block that you really need to complete your object, you simply find other blocks available and do a workaround. If we focused on the blocks that we don’t have and refused to proceed further due to the missing desired block, we will never ever finish any object. We view the box of loose Lego pieces as a treasure chest of resources to use, and rummage through for what’s usable. Digging through the box of building blocks also leads to new inspiration and ideas as we discover interesting pieces that can lead to new ideas and evolved designs.

The question to ask ourselves is: what’s in our own personal box of resources and strengths? We all have such a box that we carry around everywhere. In this box there are building blocks with different labels such as “confidence”, “skills”, “friends”, “family”, “tenacity”, “creativity”, “time”, “money”, and much much more. Just as the case in playing with Lego, we need to look at what blocks are available in our personal resource box and rummage through them and use them well to build a better life for ourselves. We have some blocks that are personal blocks, consisting of resources, character traits and strengths that we possess. We also have support blocks consisting of external resources available to us that we can leverage on such as friends, families, workplaces, school, etc. Focusing on blocks that we don’t have however, does nothing to help us progress. We need to focus on what we have, and find different ways of combining and using them and discover new ideas and inspirations as we do so. We can create a better life with what we have, not what we don’t have.

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(3)???Adapt to whatever happens

My son always wins at every scenario when we play with Lego, whether its fighting with the planes we created or car bashing to see whose car remains intact or just about any other scenario. He is an expert at immediate upgrades to his Lego creations. I might begin smugly by claiming that my plane has just shot down my son's plane thanks to the well placed Lego blocks on my plane that were actually awesome canons, and my son would simply grab some blocks and slap it on his plane and declare “no my plane has big missiles and BOOM I just shot your plane and destroyed it! I win!”. I’m sure you get the idea! And this is common when playing with Lego as we leverage on our imagination to find workarounds and substitutes, and any block can be just about anything we want it to be. So regardless of what happens, a way out is simply just a new block or two away.

While this might be a gross oversimplification of real life, this basic insight still applies. In creating a better life, things don’t always go our way as we hoped or planned. Not everything is within our control. And rather than complain or feel stuck, it might be useful to explore how might we be able to adapt and use whatever resources are available to us to do so. A way out is sometimes simply just a resource or two away.