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Playing Mantis has 2 permanent partners:
Experiential learning facilitator, ethics and values expert
Petro is an experiential learning facilitator and has extensive knowledge in the area of ethics and values. She has been intrigued by the power of stories throughout her life. This culminated in her doctoral thesis in which she developed a unique interactive story telling process to help people compare and evaluate personal and organisational values.
Industrial psychologist and improvisation expert
In essence Burgert is a connector. He is passionate about connecting people with people, people with them selves, problems with solutions, ideas with people and concepts with experiences and experienses with growth. He is a registered industrial psychologist and improvisation expert.
Burgert and Petro works as a team or individually. Playing Mantis also draws from a range of trusted people's skills and abilities to customise programmes that meet the needs of our clients. This includes creative people in business, education, theatre and design.
The way the San people of South Africa portray the praying mantis became our inspiration for many reasons.
Although he is a small and seemingly insignificant creature, far less powerful and imposing than an eland or an elephant, he has his own special magic.
Mantis can bring dead people back to life, and he does so over and over again in the many stories told about him. Similarly we aim to give new life to stale and lifeless structures. We help those who have inherited these dry bones to flesh them out and breathe life into them making them dance again.
Often in his stories when disaster is about to descend, and it seems as if life itself must fail, Mantis has a dream which tells him what to do. Disaster is averted and life goes on. We too like to draw on the creativity of the right brain and our creative instincts to come up with solutions for our clientÃs challenges. Even more importantly, we hope to inspire similar processes in your own mind so that you can generate your own innovative solutions.
To save himself in moments of great danger Mantis often gets wings and flies away - usually to the water, an ancient symbol of life. Here he can renew himself and make a brave new beginning. Likewise we hope to grow our own wings and help you do the same so we can all find places of solace and piece wihin ourselves. Here we can let our hair down, have fun and get frresh inspiration for new beginnings.
But Mantis is full of mischief, often gets into trouble while playing tricks, but without malice. We too like to keep our work playful and experimental not always knowing what will happen.
Like Mantis we are forever trying different ways of behaving and learning from our mistakes. We have agreed never to take ourselves too seriously and miss out on things that are less serious, but very important, even life sustaining. Most of all we are learning to know ourselves and find more ways to live our passion. We hope to motivate you to adopt the same mindset.