You and your friends are locked in a small, dark room. If you decipher the words, numbers, pictures and hidden clues randomly scattered around the place, you can escape. A mysterious voice announces you have 60 minutes. A frenzied excitement kicks in as you raid the room, finding the clues that if 100% solved, will open the door and you win!
Escape rooms are theatrical games that, in the past 10 years, have become effective team-building exercises, as well as a fun past-time among friends. They have taken off around the world and will likely pick up from where they left once they are able to reopen their doors, (post-pandemic permitting). Their growth has been explosive: recent data tells us there are over 3,000 escape games in Europe and around 14,000 worldwide.
Part of their success is thanks to the fact they are suitable for people of all ages and genders. They also give the unique opportunity to practice teamwork and problem-solving, as well as being an immersive and fun experience.
But aside from their surface identity as a cleverly constructed past-time, Escape rooms have the ability to teach us some valuable life lessons! Here are the top 10:
1. Start from a position of ignorance
At work or in our personal lives, our unconscious biases often get the better of us. We tend to cut to the chase, listen little and skip some potentially very important, game-changing details along the way. When you walk into the escape room for the first time, you understand you have had no way of learning anything about the situation in front of you beforehand. This teaches you to take a fresh, “from scratch” approach to what you are looking at, reading, listening to, or simply taking in your surroundings, which allows you to see the big picture and make calculated decisions rather than rash ones.
2. Team work
We always talk about team play, right? But how often can you say you have successfully achieved something thanks to a real, collective collaboration within a group? Escape rooms are never a one-player game. Without A, B, C and D, you would never have won: A did the maths, B had uncanny intuition, C kept us together and thinking straight and D asked the right questions. The game teaches us that no one person can be A, B, C and D and that we should therefore not try to get through things alone. And don’t let others try to get through things alone either. You are a piece of a puzzle that is needed. Especially during the toughest moments people should use each other’s skills.
3. Sharp Eyes
The game also teaches us to keep our eyes sharp open for new clues. This is because we are in “full focus mode” for the hour. We are alert and searching. It is thanks to this approach that we are able to quickly find, solve and jump for joy, before moving to the next intrinsic clue. What if we applied that approach to everyday life?! Keep our eyes sharp open for new opportunities that otherwise you may miss out on, whether those are work, friend, family or travel related.
4. Focus and Resilience
Escape rooms are cleverly designed to boggle our brains. Many of the clues are highly complex and require focus, time and patience (unless you simply get lucky!). By applying these three essential skills we learn to be resilient and relentlessly keep on at the challenge at hand until we finally crack it! Oftentimes in life, the challenge is a hard one to solve, leading us to get angry with it or give up. Perhaps an extra lesson here is to first accept the situation for what it is and then take an objective, determined and optimistic approach to overcome it.
5. Embrace our fears of failure
A winner’s approach to solving an Escape room is often through trial and error. In other words, keep trying potential solutions until they get it right. In real life, however, we do not give ourselves the same bandwidth. We are hard on ourselves and have somehow wrongfully learned that failure is bad. It is frustrating, but it is not bad. Failure must often necessarily happen before achieving success, don’t you think? Otherwise we would all go about life reading the theory on things that have already been done and then applying that theory to real life. How boring. And where’s the innovation?
6. Leave it. Come back later
You are likely to find some clues in Escape rooms too early on, meaning you cannot solve them because they require more information, more pieces to the puzzle that you have yet to find. In this scenario, without pointlessly racking your brains to solve immediately, the right thing to do is to leave it be for the moment, park it, and come back later when you have the 360°. Again, this kind of situation can occur in real life, where we may not be able something, no matter how hard we try. Perhaps something is missing, such as knowledge, experience, a tool, an essential piece of information. So we should do like we do in the game: If something is not working, leave it for a while and come back later with fresh eyes or the missing puzzle piece.
7. If you need help, ask for it
The chance to ask for help a few times during the hour plays an integral part of the game. It is perfectly normal to feel stuck. If you never feel stuck, it likely means that it is too easy and therefore, again, boring. Similar to fear of failure itself, we seem to have picked up somewhere that asking for help is a sign of weakness or incompetence, however the wisest of us know that we should ask for help where we are missing knowledge. That is how we learn.
8. Know your strengths
This is linked to teamwork. Once you’ve played an escape room a few times, you will have got to know who you are within the group, what you are good at and consequently what you offer to the table, at least within the context of the game. What role do you play in real life? Are you a leader? A Questioner or an Upholder? Are you the quiet one who never speaks until you pop up with the solution? Perhaps the game itself has given you an insight to discovering your hidden talent for deep analysis? In any case, self-awareness around your strengths, your ability to learn and what your future potential strengths could be, all play a very important role in self-improvement.
9. Know your kicks
Some Escape rooms are more fun for some than for others, depending on what you personally find fun. A murder mystery? A prison escape? Saving someone? Pure enigma? By the time you’ve done a few, you will know what you enjoy over all and in turn what motivates you the most. The moral of this story is that what you enjoy the most is the thing that keeps you coming back for more. Even when times are tough, the passion you keep for that thing, fuels you and keeps your momentum going. Perhaps your kick is not the type of game you are playing, but rather overcoming a challenge, being with the people you like the most, or the learning experience.
10. Have fun
Of course we cannot forget one of the greatest Escape room lessons, for any journey that you decide to take, remember to have fun along the way!
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