The weird intersection of Lego Serious Play and Michelangelo
A more personal one this time. Less a worked-out argument, more me showing you something I'm still in the middle of. Bear with me.
Recently I had to go to a work away day. The old me would have spent the whole drive up rehearsing: imaginary questions, conversations pre-played in my head, bracing for versions of the day that hadn't happened and mostly never would. The new me just drove. Good weather, the aircon actually working in the middle of a heatwave, the right soundtrack on, no rehearsal running underneath any of it - it felt a little like freedom..
So I turned up with no script and no assumptions, and just the thought of "Ah, whatever, it'll be okay" (a new approach I'm trying to take, which is a whole separate article, so I won't overload you here). We went through an interesting panel with some of the team, did a few fun, practical exercises, and then the presenter introduced Lego Serious Play. It's a method where you answer a question by building a small Lego model instead of talking it through, the theory being that your hands get at things words don't. I was, let's say, sceptical. But I was committed to giving it a proper go, because honestly, why not?
It turns out something odd happens when you communicate by building instead of speaking. A different part of you shows up. Thoughts arrive sideways that you'd never have reached head on. I let myself get absorbed in it. When the timer went I looked up, and everyone else had built these intricate, expressive things. I was genuinely enraptured listening to them explain it, a fascinating insight into the people I was sat with. Then I looked down at mine. Simpler. Rougher. What was meant to be a sculpture.
The old me would have been knee deep in insecurity about that inside a second. But new me looked at this plain little sculpture and knew there was something in it I actually wanted to say. That sculpture is the centrepiece of what I'm trying to communicate today, and it only took three paragraphs to get here.
The work is taking away, not piling on.
A while back I heard an idea that apparently came from Michelangelo. He believed the statues he carved were already finished inside the block of marble before he even started. He wasn't adding anything. The figure was already in there, and all he did was chip away the bits hiding it. Whatever you're trying to make already exists. The work is taking away, not piling on.
That reframed something for me. I'd spent years accumulating. More money, more things, more friends, more knowledge, more skills, all on the vague assumption that enough of it would finally add up to feeling satisfied. But most of us know it doesn't work like that. Keep adding brushstrokes to a canvas forever and you don't get a masterpiece. You get a black canvas caked in paint. Nothing like what you set out to make.
So what if the things I actually wanted to recognise in myself were already there, and the job was to clear away what was burying them? I came to this the hard way. All that accumulating, as a way to cover my insecurities, was part of what burned me out in the first place. I'd stacked so much on that I lost sight of everything I had. Since coming out the other side, I've been putting the subtraction idea to more and more of my life. And I'll be honest, it helps me a lot.
Which is what my little, sort-of sculpture was trying to convey. When it came to my turn to explain it, I told the group it was my confidence in group settings. And the idea was simple: my confidence isn't something I still need to grow. It's already in there. It needs uncovering. So I chip away at it. I take away the anxiety of presenting by actually being prepared, properly grounded in the material (not the same as rehearsing disasters on the drive!). I take away the fear of performing badly by noticing the evidence, the long history that shows I'm good at what I do. Clear the things blocking it, and let what's underneath come up. Uncover the confidence that's already there.
Uncover the confidence that's already there.
Now, I'm not telling anyone to stop aiming for more. This isn't one of those binary choices where you have to pick an extreme. Grow, learn, add, to your heart's content. But do the other thing too: notice what's already there, and clear what's sitting on top of it. Do both, and everything you've spent years collecting finally gets room to breathe, instead of staying buried under the pile.
You obviously don't have to do what I say, but I'd really encourage you to spend a few minutes this week trying the reframe: do I need more of this, or do I need to chip away some of the marble to get at what's already there?
For me, it always used to be "how do I make more money?". Now it's more, "Instead of buying more stuff, what can I strip away so I can enjoy more of what I already have?"
The Editor's session
I'd take this one to the Reviewer. It's the one for making sense of something that happened, and it doesn't have to be big or heavy — this whole piece is me trying to understand why an ordinary work day quietly shifted how I see myself.
I went to a work away day braced for the worst and left oddly moved by a Lego exercise about self-expression. Help me make sense of why something so small landed the way it did.
What actually happened in that exercise, separate from the meaning you've since wrapped around it, and which part is really doing the work for you?
Something to think about
Pick one thing you keep chasing more of, money, a skill, approval. Do you truly need more of it, or is what you actually want already there, under the pile?
If something here landed, or opened something you'd rather not work through alone, I'd genuinely like to hear about it. The best issues come from real stories, so if this one stirred something in yours, write to me at desk@thinkfurther.uk.