At Promenada mall, in the Lego store, there is a corner with many mixed pieces for children to use in the store: building all kinds of things. The imagination of children always fascinated me with their innocent way of picking up from thousands of little pieces, mixing them without any meaning, and giving them a shape. It seems to me that they are artists who are still unable to tell us the meaning behind their creations. And we do not have sufficient imagination or patience to understand them.
I invite you to think about our lives as a creation made of Lego blocks. What construction would your life be?
Mine would be a carousel with horses that, from time to time, come out of the carousel, have a different life, and then they go back to do their work.
Let us imagine that we open all the Lego pieces and we put them in a large box, so large that we can see them clearly. We have our life deconstructed into small pieces.
Those pieces can be, among others:
- Our home
- The office
- Colleagues
- Clients
- Our passions – cars, perfumes, trips, books, sports
- Money
- The family we have made
- Our parents
- The courses we do
- Gadgets
- Our fashion style
- Mentors
- Our fears
- Joys
- Our favourite restaurants
- Animals
Those are large categories that we can deconstruct in smaller parts, as a Lego game.
After we have deconstructed our object (for me, the carousel), we look at the pieces in different ways, from different angles, the same way children do in the store. And we reconstruct, this time thinking differently, standing, metaphorically speaking, upside down, to have other perspectives. The goal is to build something that works better for us, given the times we live in, given our long-term objectives.
We can establish some reference points. For example: mentally, emotionally, to have, to be, to become, or others: career, financial, spiritual, family, health.
In some areas maybe we have too much, in other too little. Maybe we would want more in other areas, to have a more balanced life. Maybe in some areas we have some constraints.
We could then use a traffic lights type of exercise: red: stop, what we do not want; yellow: what we want to change; green: what we want to keep, continue.
I believe that a red thread in this rethink could be our values, what really matters to us. I would say freedom; creativity; learning, among the first.
Before reconstructing, I want to evoke an experiment that we did at an event: we had to rethink a yogurt package taking the consumer into account. We were in groups: I was the interviewed consumer and observed by 5 people. Right there I realised that I would only eat a certain type of yogurt, with Madagascar Vanilla, that I would get for breakfast at a hotel in Paris; I was eating that yogurt for the promise that the sensation gave me: a breeze of Madagascar, fantasizing about that place.
Similarly, when we reconstruct, we can think about what we want, who we address it to, why, what is the goal, what is the vision for the future.
We can take the example from children: if you give them those pieces, there, in the store, they will create different constructions, again and again. They have this mental flexibility that we, adults, often have lost.
What would you reconstruct? How would you like the construction that would represent your life to look like, ideally?