LEGO and the psychological benefits of building with pieces

LEGO pieces and their construction are a great tool to externalize your own belief and emotion system, since the individual comes into contact with the most implicit knowledge of his person and the present of it.

Building LEGO pieces and emotional intelligence

This free construction process has a positive effect on developing emotional intelligence and is also a tool used in psychotherapy and business coaching.

In the following interview, Mª Teresa Mata, a collaborating psychologist at the Institute of Psychological and Psychiatric Assistance Mensalus, she presents this tool to us as one of the new allies of emotional intelligence training.

How has Lego broken into the world of Psychology and Coaching?

Currently, the dynamics based on the representation of ideas through free construction through Lego pieces or similar, has become a fantastic work tool in the world of coaching business. Recent studies have shown their efficiency by verifying the high level of information they generate, information rich in content and highly useful structure for the resolution of all kinds of conflicts. Specifically,

The LEGO® Serious® Play® Method is the method that, in this sense, has gone around the world.

On the other hand, from the training / coaching of emotional intelligence, we have discovered in this method a new work instrument that, Like the rest of outsourcing techniques, it promotes imagination and unleashes creativity, thus becoming the perfect ally to promote self-knowledge, self-expression, the projection of challenges and objective capacity, in addition to certain social skills as the empathy.

What happens when we start to build?

With the constructions a connection to another level is established. The liberation of imagination and creativity is closely related to the use of the hands. When the hands come into play, we start a whole set of mental processes that allow access to the deepest knowledge. In this way we manage to promote communication at another level (both communication with oneself and with others).

When this technique is transferred to a system (a work team, a family, a workshop group), it is makes a lot of information visible: each individual offers a small sample about what their perception of the world. This puts different points of view on the table in a quick and visual way, and promotes dialogue and empathic capacity as we mentioned.

The feedback that is generated in a session when so much information emerges must be incredible, right?

Certain. This is one of the great advantages of using techniques that activate messages through creativity and association: messages that appear are fresh, full of wit and wisdom, details that, from other processing models, would hardly come out. light.

Often times, information that goes unnoticed on a daily basis can become the driving force behind unknown options and untried solutions. This is a job that, from the training of the emotional intelligence, we especially promote:

"What knowledge do I have and what knowledge do I not take advantage of" / "What knowledge awakens in me when I see and hear the knowledge of others".

What else can you explain to us about this methodology and the work carried out from Coaching and Psychotherapy?

Through creation with construction pieces, without realizing it, the unconscious barriers that emerge in social interaction diminish, thus allowing intelligent conversations to emerge that help people connect with their knowledge and knowledge of others.

In the workshops we put this into practice, for example, by formulating a “mobilizing” question.. Once the question is raised, the participants let their resolution capacity flow. The next step is to make this information tangible from the construction with parts. The results are incredible. The methodology rescues information that is usually “out of use”. The fact of exposing, ordering, and validating said information within a framework of skills training generates a high level of introspection and insight.

In short, what is the relationship between emotional intelligence training and building with LEGO pieces?

From Emotional Intelligence we seek to synthesize the complex, express the abstract, touch the invisible, concretize the volatile. We are looking for a way to simplify processes and obtain “powerful” information in order to facilitate its use and increase the efficiency of our actions.

The training of emotional intelligence through inspired free construction in response to a mobilizing question, as we explained, accelerates the obtaining of useful information. This is achieved by promoting processes that connect with the implicit knowledge of the person, a knowledge that has been established throughout their life course.

With the LEGO pieces and figures that complement the creative scenarios, each user builds, projects and observes, becomes the spectator of his own creation, a privileged position since it allows to take distance from the possible conflict and make use of the information in a more intelligent way. Likewise, in the workshops, each one is a spectator of the others' creations, a fact that provides a multitude of ideas and options.

And the ideas of each other, even living different conflicts, are they useful for everyone?

This is the most interesting point of the outsourcing work in emotional intelligence. It is very revealing when, at the end of a free construction session, the participants adopt solutions as a result of the knowledge obtained from other people's experiences, not just their own. For this to be possible, the key is in the formulation of the mobilizing question (s).

Our great challenge is always based on raising a common unknown for everyone, even if the experiences and life contexts are different; With this we achieve a high level of group connection and emotionally intelligent feedback.