Virtue:
"Eutrapelia"
Other names:
Leisureliness
Playfulness
Definition:
Reasonable use of free time to rejuvenate; moderation in the use of recreation
Advice:
Should not be indecent; should not destroy the good order that has arisen from our work; should fit the time and place (II-II q168 a2)
"make exercise a priority" (Corley #4)
Get enough sleep (Corley #7)
Empirical Research:
Humor enables us to cope with stress; the Coping Humor Scale (R.A. Martin, 1996) measures this ability in individuals.
Humor improves one's mood and relieves stress (Martin, 1996, 2001; Ruch and Köhler, 1988). The habit of laughter physiologically improves our musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, endocrine, immunological and neural systems. In other words, we are physically designed to laugh.
McGee (1999) views humor as an extension of playfulness. A playful frame of mind enables us to see things that might otherwise be puzzling, annoying or frightening as funny. McGee also believes humor can be improved through practice. He suggests a program that begins with enjoying humorous situations in everyday life, and then moves towards learning to laugh at oneself and finding humor even in stress.
Case examples:
Gifts of the Holy Spirit
Further reading:
Vices opposed:
Obscenity, using inappropriate words or deeds for fun
Frivolity*, being playful in inappropriate situations
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn his book, It's Your Ship, Captain Michael Abrashoff explains how he used recreation to foster productivity and morale among his crew on the U.S.S. Benfold. "I focused my leadership efforts on encouraging people not only to find better ways to do their jobs, but also to have fun as they did them. And sometimes—actually, a lot of times—I encouraged them to have fun for fun’s sake. Little gestures go a long way.
"At our base in San Diego, for example, I decided to quit feeding the crew with official Navy rations, and instead used the ship’s food budget to buy quality civilian brands that were cheaper as well as tastier. With the saved money, I sent some of our cooks to culinary school. What they learned turned Benfold into a lunchtime mecca for sailors from all over the San Diego base.
"There were also our music videos, courtesy of stealth technology. We have all heard of the stealth bomber. We are now building ships using stealth characteristics to minimize our radar signature so that the enemy cannot easily find us. By using angled decks and radar-absorbing materials on the hull, an enemy’s radar beam is either deflected or absorbed. As a result, an 8,300-ton, 505-foot-long destroyer looks no bigger on an enemy’s radar screen than a fishing boat. The angled superstructure that stealth technology dictated on the after part of Benfold resembled the screen of an old drive-in movie theater. So one of my more resourceful sailors created outdoor entertainment by projecting music videos on that surface that the refueling crews could enjoy. The shows generated a lot of buzz throughout the fleet and lightened up a tedious and sometimes dangerous job.
"While spending thirty-five interminable autumn days in the scorching Persian Gulf, we acquired a lifeboat full of pumpkins, a fruit alien to the Middle East. Our supply officer pulled off this coup, and I thought it would be micromanaging to ask for an explanation. After we overdosed on pumpkin pie, we distributed scores of unused pumpkins for a jack-o’-lantern carving contest." (Abrashoff, It’s Your Ship, pp. 17-18)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteCaptain Michael Abrashoff explains the overall importance of eutrapelia in his book, It's Your Ship. "I often get the feeling that corporate America, like the military, is headed for a nervous breakdown. We are now permanently wired to our work, wherever we are. Even on vacation, we’re tethered to pagers, cell phones, and laptops, so we can log in from the beach. This is okay, in moderation. In excess, it eats away at the inner reservoir of spirit that people need to draw on when life gets tough. If you work seventy or eighty hours a week and never take time out for a work/life balance, the reservoir doesn’t refill and soon you’re running on empty. When times get tough, the body may be willing but the spirit will be out to lunch.
"Long ago, one of Neptune’s admirals must have decreed that working sailors are forbidden to have fun at sea. Our own admirals took the rule as gospel; no alternative had ever occurred to them. I wanted to change that. When I interviewed my sailors, I asked them not only how we could improve the ship’s performance, but also how we could have fun at work. The responses were amazing."
…
"We tried to instill fun in everything we did, especially mundane, repetitive jobs such as loading food aboard the ship. Except in San Diego, where Irv Refkin’s conveyor belt came to our aid, that was a chore we did by hand, and it was hard work. We decided that music would make the job go faster. With our huge stereo system playing great tunes, it was a whole new scene. Everyone danced and boogied to the music. The officers and chiefs supervising the workforce ended up pitching in themselves. Music seemed to make even the most boring task fun—a lesson that somehow escaped the U.S. Navy." (Abrashoff, It’s Your Ship, ch. 12)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteCaptain Michael Abrashoff of the U.S.S. Benfold explains how he would even go so far as to bend the rules to ensure his sailors had a fair chance of enjoying themselves on shore leave at Dubai. "When I met a sailor returning to our ship, I asked cheerily how he liked Dubai. He said he hated the place. So did his shipmates. This floored me. How could anyone hate Dubai?
"The problem was the transportation. He explained that the buses were sixty-passenger rattletraps driven by demons who refused to stop when our sailors wanted to get off or on. Moreover, the Navy had ruled that sailors were restricted to using the buses to get around. Because of security concerns, they weren’t even allowed to walk or take a taxi.
"This was not the kind of experience my crew deserved, so I immediately got rid of the buses and hired twenty ten-passenger vans. That way, ten sailors could check out their own chauffeured van and go anywhere they wanted in Dubai and its environs.
"However, hiring those vans violated Navy regulations. Many years ago, some well-meaning bean counter thought it would be cost-beneficial to require sixty-passenger buses for sailors on liberty. But I thought that cost had to be balanced with safety and the crew’s experience. In my view, those behemoths were not only inconvenient, they were highly vulnerable targets. If one of them got hit by a terrorist, it might kill sixty sailors, whereas attacking one of my vans would cause ten casualties at worst.
...
"Against regulations or not, the vans were the right thing to do. Overnight, my crew started enjoying Dubai, and I slept better knowing they were safer than before." (Abrashoff, It’s Your Ship, pp. 144-45)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteWhen Carly Fiorina became CEO of Hewlett-Packard, she instituted a series of Leadership Framework meetings for the company's senior managers. As she explains in her memoir, Tough Choices, she sought to maintain a sense of high morale in these meetings by encouraging a spirit of healthy play. "These management meetings were serious events where attendance and participation were mandatory, but we also needed to have some fun as a team. From our first senior leaders’ meeting through the last I would attend, skits and contests always played an important part in the team building. At one meeting we asked teams to create videos of the 'old HP' and the 'new HP.' At another we asked teams to pick, and sing, theme songs for the company. We always discovered wonderful hidden talent on the management team. All of this was harmless fun and helped people blow off steam and get to know one another better. And poking fun at the boss was always an important and frequently hilarious part of these events; you can bet that the alleged hairdresser on the airplane was always good for a laugh!" (Fiorina, Tough Choices, ch. 24)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteYvon Chouinard, extreme mountaineer and founder of the Patagonia sportswear company, explains his philosophy of infusing work with play in his book, Let My People Go Surfing. "One of my favorite sayings about entrepreneurship is: If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. The delinquent is saying with his actions, 'This sucks. I’m going to do my own thing.' Since I had never wanted to be a businessman, I needed a few good reasons to be one. One thing I did not want to change, even if we got serious: Work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis. We all had to come to work on the balls of our feet and go up the stairs two steps at a time. We needed to be surrounded by friends who could dress whatever way they wanted, even be barefoot. We all needed to have flextime to surf the waves when they were good, or ski the powder after a big snowstorm, or stay home and take care of a sick child. We needed to blur that distinction between work and play and family." (Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing, ch. 1)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteFootball legend Don Shula illustrates the value of maintaining a sense of humor in Everyone's a Coach. "I'm called all kinds of names - Sherman Tank, Bulldozer, and others...But there are few things I like better than a good laugh. A sense of humor helps you keep things in perspective. If I am blunt and honest with someone on our team, I hope this person keeps things in perspective and realizes that I am trying to bring out the best in him and do what is best for the team. A sense of humor also permits you to accept criticism without getting consumed by it. Criticism never becomes a life-and-death situation. One of my greatest joys in coaching has been working with players who had a good sense of humor. They took what they did seriously - but they took themselves lightly. They also helped me to do the same." (p. 162)
One example Shula gives of just such a player is former Baltimore receiver Jimmy Orr. "Orr was great at catching passes, but he didn't like to block downfield. His reluctance to get physical annoyed me. One day I decided to confront the problem in front of the entire squad. To make my point, I talked about all the great runs Jimmy Brown, the legendary Cleveland Browns fullback, was making. I said, 'If you study Cleveland's films, every time Brown makes a long run, he has receivers like Ray Renfrew downfield throwing key blocks for him. These blocks are what enable him to score or gain big yardage. And yet here we've got a receiver who won't hit anybody. Orr, you could at least get downfield and get into somebody's way.'
"Orr said, 'Coach, before you go on, could I say something?'
"'Sure' I said.
"You can't expect a thoroughbred to do a mule's work.
"This really broke me up. In the middle of a serious point, Orr had brought me to my knees. Over the years, I've learned that the ideal way to be is working hard and accomplishing while enjoying what you're doing. This helps create an honest and open environment." (Blanchard and Shula, Everyone’s a Coach, p. 162 and pp. 163-64)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn his autobiography, Made in America, Wal-Mart Sam Walton explains how he came up with the idea of mixing work with play during stockholders' meetings in order to give them a better idea of the company's character and values. "Most meetings," he observes, " are held in some hotel ballroom in a big city, and are pretty quick, formal affairs with the reading of the minutes and the passing of a few shareholder motions...We took the opposite approach. We figured we were already out of the way enough to discourage anybody from coming, but since we wanted to encourage folks to attend, we scheduled a whole weekend of events for them." (p. 129)
This approach proved crucial to helping shareholders understand the Midwestern cultural sensibility that Sam Walton brought to his business. "The values and approach of most retailers were entirely different from what this crazy bunch in Arkansas was doing, and we wanted them to see it for themselves. So they would come down and we would have the stockholders' meeting on Friday, followed by a big picnic that night. I remember one lady wore a formal gown to one of our dinners. It got quite a few curious looks. Then we would get them up early on Saturday morning and have them come to our meeting and listen to us talk merchandising and finance and distribution, or whatever we were dealing with at the time.
"In the early days, it wasn't anything like what it's turned into now, which is the largest, most raucous stockholders' meeting in the world. But it was different. After the meeting on Saturday, we always had a special event. One year it was a golf tournament, which is not at all unusual, I guess. But another year we went on Bull Shoals Lake. And another year we took everybody on a float trip down Sugar Creek. The wildest event I remember was when we all went camping overnight in tents on the banks of Sugar Creek. That was a real fiasco. Remember now, these are a bunch of investment analysts from the big cities. Well, a coyote started howling, and hoot owls hooting, and half of these analysts stayed up all night around the campfire because they couldn't sleep. We decided it wasn't the best idea to try something like this with folks who weren't accustomed to camping on the rocks in sleeping bags." (pp. 131-32) (Walton, Made in America)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn his book, It’s Your Ship, Captain Michael Abrashoff of the U.S.S. Benfold explains how he worked to bring a certain levity to his commandship. “Little gestures go a long way [such as]... our music videos, courtesy of stealth technology. We have all heard of the stealth bomber. We are now building ships using stealth characteristics to minimize our radar signature so that the enemy cannot easily find us. By using angled decks and radar-absorbing materials on the hull, an enemy’s radar beam is either deflected or absorbed. As a result, an 8,300-ton, 505-foot-long destroyer looks no bigger on an enemy’s radar screen than a fishing boat. The angled superstructure that stealth technology dictated on the after part of Benfold resembled the screen of an old drive-in movie theater. So one of my more resourceful sailors created outdoor entertainment by projecting music videos on that surface that the refueling crews could enjoy. The shows generated a lot of buzz throughout the fleet and lightened up a tedious and sometimes dangerous job.” (Abrashoff, It’s Your Ship, Ch. 1)