Did You Know How Good Legos are for You?

At least that’s what María Teresa Mata believes. She’s a well-known psychiatrist who thinks this free building process has very positive effects. First of all, it has the ability to develop emotional intelligence. It’s also ideal for business coaching and psychotherapy. Want to see how?

Psychological benefits of legos

LEGO is a brand, true. But these building games are very common in toy stores. So they’re a very accessible tool for businesses and psychologists, who have discovered amazing benefits.

Legos as a work tool

One important point of legos’ psychological benefits is its use as a tool in the world of business coaching. When it comes to idea representation, free building is proven to be effective. Why? It generates a lot of information.

Also, they’ve even patented the lego serious play method, which has already had amazing results. That’s because it offers huge benefits for conflict resolution due to the large amount of information it generates.

People are also using it in coaching and emotional intelligence training. This is partly because it’s an externalizing technique. This means it promotes creativity and gives free rein to imagination and expression. Also, it improves our ability to come up with goals. It promotes empathy too!

Building is connecting on another level

According to Mata, building with legos establishes connections on new levels. We join the pieces, our creativity, our imagination, and hands. These things set in motion certain mental processes that give the observer (the psychologist, for example) insight.

So then, building can get us to new levels of communication. And actually, it’s communication with ourselves but also with others. Why? Because when we shift the technique to a work team, family, etc, much more information comes to light.

Building games allow each individual to offer a small window into how they see the world. Thus diverse ways of seeing the world become visible, which promotes more dialogue and empathy.

Appearance of new messages

According to Mata, the messages we receive when we use this technique are fresh. We reach them through associations of ideas and creativity. This means the messages are truly smart, even wise, something we really see with other methods.

Among the psychological benefits of LEGO, we find a huge amount of information that would otherwise go unnoticed. And t hanks to these messages, we can find new solutions  because they promote emotional intelligence training. 

Knocking down unconscious barriers

We find another benefit of building games in the knocking down of unconscious barriers. Those shields that come out almost unintentionally in any social interaction. They disappear and slowly fall down when we “play” with legos. We learn about ourselves and others.

It also increases problem-solving abilities. Sometimes we feel incapable of solving problems, like we can’t find the necessary information inside ourselves.

According to Mata, legos help us find that information, then display, organize, and validate it. The list of benefits keeps growing…

Abstract expression

When it comes to emotional intelligence, building is an excellent arena to express abstract things and synthesize complex information. It simplifies the processes. At the same time, we get fantastic information on how to improve our efficiency.

Let’s teach emotional intelligence with legos. We’ll connect with inner knowledge that’s been there, dormant, our whole lives. And when we provide a creative environment, the user constructs, observes, projects, and gets distance from their creation. This will give them the information they need to solve conflicts, for example.