People, Problems and Possibilities: Conceiving the 5P Framework

How the 4P Framework came about and how the 4Ps became ... the 5Ps (Pause, Play, Passion, Purpose, Pleasure)

May 22, 2023

a boat on the water — Photo by Div Manickam on Unsplash

Once upon a time, there were …

So many people, so many problems. Had the world gotten worse, what with COVID‑19, the war in Ukraine and climate change? And then there was our imminent demise from artificial intelligence, the genie we’d let out of the bottle. The robots were coming for us.

Every day …

Everywhere I turned, everything seemed to be getting worse and worse. People told me again and again, in person, and from inside small and large devices, that the sky was definitely, irreversibly, falling.

But in the last 15 years, I’d travelled to over 30 countries, worldschooling my son. We’d hiked with some of the world’s happiest and poorest individuals up to an exploding volcano in the dead of night on a tiny island in the South Pacific; we’d volunteered in makeshift outdoor classrooms in Southeast Asia; we’d spent days (days!) shovelling elephant poop in Thailand. And every time we returned to our home in France, we came back thinking the world was spinning just as it should on its axis.

We also came back thinking that here we were in the West, with all our objects and comfort, completely and utterly – remarkably – deprived. We lived in a world of constant problems – the French had shut down their country in early 2023 for months on end, over-sized rats roaming (and owning) Paris streets as garbage piled high, and royal visits were postponed. They had good reason, the French said: we cannot have our retirement age extended – mais, c’est impossible!

This was our context, living in Europe, regularly travelling the world when COVID wasn’t locking us and everyone else up for our own good. We spent a month here and there in the United States once COVID lifted and watched and listened, braced ourselves, for our inevitable, ultimate human demise. We read books on the evolution of humankind, dived deep into all the trouble humans had been getting up to for centuries, and for my part, I set to work working with individuals to solve some of the world’s bigger problems, conceiving and delivering international design thinking workshops.

One day …

An idea began to rise, to bubble up.

My mind cast back to the times I had watched my young son play in poor, rural villages with local children. Children of all ages and colors, from different backgrounds, speaking different languages, at times not sharing a common spoken language, sharing instead a physical one. They would sit or lie in the sand, building, creating, designing things – games, pathways, dreams. And suddenly! They’d be up and about running down the beach or splashing in the warm, tropical waters, sharks and jellyfish be damned!

Play, I said, to myself. Play is what they’re up to. Play is what drives – and unites – them.

If I’m honest, play was the first element I started thinking about.

Because of that …

Other ideas began to bubble up.

In January 2023, we closed our worldschooling adventures in India – our last trip together educating our son in the “wild”. On his way to studying aeronautics in a US university with the dream of being part of the solution for green flight, he looked at me as the sun fell into the backwaters, “This. This is what is important.” I wondered what his “this” was. I sat in silence. His, my, pause, swelled. In time, he filled it, “It’s this. Being here, right now. Just being here, together. It’s also travel. Being able to see the world. To see and feel these colors, this light, to hear that laugh from the boat’s makeshift kitchen. This is something I cannot see or feel or hear anywhere else in the world. Being here, right now, in this pause between “things”, is what is important.” I couldn’t help but agree.

India had been about pause the whole trip – hard to believe, I know. You think of India and you think of chaos and color and contrast, and you would be right, so right. But this trip to India was about leaving the phones and the laptops behind, about getting out into the miles and miles of tea plantations, climbing to the highest peaks, peeling back the skin of an orange and smelling the best gosh-darned citrus-y smell you ever did smell, right there, right then. It was about walking for hours in silence as your guide tracked wild animals; the slightest twig breaking spooking the bison or the bird you’d come here to see, among the leeches, the wet grasses, under the humid canopy, your home for a day.

I had been experimenting with pause for a year before the India trip, taking tech shabbats, spending time in nature, reorganizing my work (and schooling) life to prioritise rest and recovery during the day, during the week, during the month, every day and week and month of the year. A lot of that pause was about permission – giving myself and others the time we needed to sit with something, or nothing at all.

And my son was onto something, as we sat there in the backwaters.

Because of that …

He sparked something further in the 4P Framework.

I’d been thinking about how pause and play – and passion and purpose – all fit together for at least the last year. I’d been researching each element on its own, reading everything I could on pause (rest), play (fun, humour), passion (arts, sports, hobbies) and purpose (meaning). I’d been listening to podcasts, watching TED talks and participating in book clubs whose books touched on these topics.

I’d been talking about and using the principles in my work with coaching clients – exploring how we could bring these elements back into our lives, and what happened when we did. I co-founded a programme called the “Optimal Week” which got people around the world designing their weeks around not what they needed to get done but how they wanted to feel during their one optimal week. Starting with an intended state (of happiness, for example, or satisfaction, or delight, or peace) was revolutionary for some of our participants – as so many of them were task-driven and disconnected from feeling, well, much of anything, beyond tired and stressed. I was fascinated to watch how many of them brought in elements of pause, play, passion and purpose – or rest, fun, hobbies and meaning – into the weeks they designed – and how well it worked for them, time and time again.

Until finally …

It hit me.

My son’s passion was traveling, his purpose was about making air travel safe and accessible for all, without harming the planet. His pause was about being in the moment with me. His play took the form of filling the space with ideas.

But there was one more thing. I could hear it in his description of his experience, “To see and feel these colours, this light, to hear that laugh from the boat’s makeshift kitchen.” In his description, I could almost touch the pleasure he felt in this moment. It was more than palpable – it was its own, very real, force. Pleasure.

Pleasure was the piece that made the 4Ps I’d been thinking about for a full year, work. He later put it to me this way, “Pleasure is the magnifier – it makes everything, everything, better. It is also the input. It is the thing that makes you want to pause or play or pursue a passion. It’s the thing that helps you find your purpose. But it’s not just the input. It’s the output, magnified, once you put it through any of the 4Ps. You add pleasure to play – you get even more playfulness. You add pleasure to pause – you get even more peacefulness. You add pleasure to passion – you get even more pep! You add pleasure to purpose – you get even more power. Pleasure, it turned out, was the missing – central – piece.

So this book I am writing is about a simple, yet powerful framework, that brings together pause, play, passion, purpose – and pleasure (the “5Ps”). It is the result of years of reflection, research and experimentation in individual and group settings. It provides a life approach to help readers reconnect with themselves and each other through play, pause, passion, purpose and pleasure. It provides tools, exercises and tactics in addition to a framework, building on my coaching work with hundreds of clients, my design thinking work with international teams and drawing on all those years travelling the world, teaching and learning on the ground, alongside a young, curious mind, who is now on his way out into the world.

So many people, so many problems? The 5Ps turn that premise upside down. So many people, yes. And so many possibilities, I offer. I say to the French, and to you, Mais oui, c’est possible!

Hit Pause, Then Play

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