Here’s the story behind the Flop Break videos we’ve been posting. In March, our local schools, like many others, announced that they would close due to Covid-19. We imagined all of the families trying to work and learn together at home and realized that we might be able to help in some small way. 

We considered going live each day through one of the social media platforms, but then realized pre-recorded video allowed us more flexibility. Originally, the content started out as Paul performing parts of his shows to entertain people at home. That was fun and funny, but we would have run out of material. After a day of filming and producing it, something about it didn’t feel right. Sometimes, you just have to recognize when something is a flop!

Then it hit us. We don’t want to just entertain people at home. We want to engage them. We want to remind them to take mental and physical breaks when they are working and schooling from home. We want to model for them being mindful, taking care of themselves, and being playful even in the midst of the chaos. So Flop Breaks emerged. 

For the first week, we posted a video each day at 3pm encouraging people to take a 5 minute break to flop with us. The second week, we moved into juggling. In each case, we had suggestions for how you could participate even if you didn’t have a flop ball or juggling ball. It’s been a great practice for us to be on camera with such frequency as painful as it sometimes is to watch. We don’t just tell our audiences to observe without judgement and play with variables - we put ourselves through it, too.

We’ve made the choice to continue the Flop Breaks once a week instead of every day. Partly because we needed the time for other projects and partly because there’s a lot of free virtual resources available now and it became a little overwhelming. We post Flop Breaks on Mondays to kick off the week on a fun note, remind people to create a habit of taking breaks, and give players a challenge to work on in order to level up their skills. Remember to take a Flop Break each week by following us on LinkedIn, Facebook, or YouTube.