This last year, I’ve been researching playfulness in greater depth. It has always been an important part of my juggling work as a performer and teacher, and I just decided to dive in a little deeper. What I’ve seen is that play and playfulness can be a solid healthy base for any activity and it doesn’t have to be something that comes after hard work. Work and play can go hand-in-hand. Even serious jobs can find elements of play. Play doesn’t make us, or our work, childish, although kids love to play and are mostly allowed to. And being playful isn’t something that makes us less professional. Take what you do seriously, but not yourself!

A playful mindset is the stuff that builds great artists, sportsmen, scientists, and thinkers, and it can give an edge to anybody in their own field. The curiosity, concentration and generosity that a playful mindset allows us takes us much further into quality and innovation and makes us feel great along the way. Playfulness becomes an attitude, and a way of living. As jugglers, becoming more playful in this dreary world, can have multiple benefits:      Our training sessions become more enjoyable, exciting and unexpected     The quality of our juggling ability increases     We have more fun (wasn’t juggling supposed to be fun?) ...