Building Identity Brick by Brick: How LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® Helps Us Construct Self-Understanding

There is a question that every human being eventually has to answer, and most of us never finish answering it.

Who am I?

It sounds simple. But when adolescents or adults are asked to articulate their identity in words, something strange happens. They freeze. They give clichés. They reach for what they think others want to hear. The verbal channel, the one we typically rely on, is often the hardest channel through which to access an honest self.

This is where a deceptively simple tool has been quietly transforming counselling rooms, leadership offsites, and classrooms around the world. It uses plastic bricks. It looks like play. And the research suggests it works on the deepest layers of who we are.

It is called LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®, and it deserves your attention.

The Problem with “Just Tell Me About Yourself”

In a landmark 2017 study published in the Journal of College Student Development, Taiwanese researcher Wen-Chih Tseng followed 45 economically disadvantaged college students through an eight-week intervention. Half of them participated in weekly LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® (LSP) sessions. The other half did not.

The results were striking. Students in the LSP group developed significantly more coherent, agentic, and connected life stories. Their anxiety and depression dropped and stayed lower at the one-month follow-up. Their life satisfaction and subjective happiness rose. The model fit statistics suggested that 88% of the variance in their adjustment outcomes could be traced back to changes in narrative identity.

In other words: it was not the bricks that healed them. It was what the bricks let them say.

What Is Narrative Identity, and Why Does It Matter?

Psychologist Dan McAdams describes narrative identity as a person's internalized and evolving life story, integrating the reconstructed past and imagined future to provide life with some degree of unity and purpose.

Some people's life stories are scattered, contradictory, or stuck. Others are full of meaning. The difference is not in what happened to them. The difference is in how the story has been told to themselves.

McAdams identifies three qualities of a healthy life narrative:

1. Coherence: Does the story make sense? Does it have a logical and emotional throughline?

2. Agency: Does the protagonist (you) have power, intention, and the capacity to shape what happens?

3. Communion: Does the story include love, belonging, and connection to others?

Research consistently shows that people whose narratives have these three qualities are more resilient, less anxious, and more satisfied with their lives. The story is not just a description of the self. The story is a tool for building the self.

Why Thinking with Your Hands Changes Everything

Here is where LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® enters the picture.

Traditional self-reflection asks the brain to do two hard things at once: feel the experience and articulate it. For people carrying difficult histories, this combination is often overwhelming. The words either dry up, or they become defensive performances.

LSP solves this by routing reflection through the hands.

Participants are given bricks and asked to build a model of their challenge, their values, their future self, their turning point. Then they tell the story of what they built. The model becomes a metaphor. The metaphor creates psychological distance. And from that distance, the truth becomes safer to approach.

This is what the research community calls creative exploration. As media researcher David Gauntlett observed, when people build before they speak, they bypass the rehearsed scripts and access something more honest. The bricks become a kind of permission slip.

There are four moves at the heart of the LSP method:

Pose the question. A challenge is offered. Build the moment in your life when everything changed.
Build the model. The hands work before the words arrive. Meaning emerges in the building, not before it.
Tell the story. The participant explains what they built, and in the telling, the story becomes real.
Reflect together. Others bear witness. The self is seen by a community without being judged by it.

What Actually Happens in the Room

When students in Tseng's study built their Chapters of Life, their Difficult Challenges, or their Anticipated Futures, they were not just playing. They were doing the slow, sacred work of authoring themselves.

Compare this with the control group, who were simply asked to write their stories. The control group repeated the same events. Their writing got thinner, not deeper. They could not find new ways in.

The LSP participants found new ways in every week. They surprised themselves. They externalised parts of their identity that had never been spoken before. And critically, when their peers and facilitators witnessed those models without judgement, something shifted: the emerging self was validated rather than corrected.

This is the part most adults underestimate. We assume identity is built privately, in the silence of our own thoughts. The research suggests the opposite. Identity becomes durable when it is built in front of someone who can see it without trying to fix it.

Three Practical Invitations

You do not need a certified LSP facilitator or a starter kit to begin applying these principles. Here are three practices you can try this week.

1. Build before you speak. The next time a young person, colleague, or client is struggling to articulate something difficult, do not press for words. Give them objects, e.g., bricks, paper, anything tactile, and ask them to make a model of what is going on. Then ask them to describe it. Watch what happens.

2. Practice the three questions of narrative identity. Pick a recent event in your life. Ask yourself:

• Does this fit into the larger story I am telling about myself? (coherence)
• Where was my agency in this moment? (agency)
• Who else was in this story with me? (communion)

If one of these questions feels difficult to answer, that is the one worth sitting with.

3. Witness without fixing. When someone shares the story of their life, whether built from bricks or spoken aloud, resist the urge to advise, correct, or reframe. The most therapeutic act is often the simplest: "Thank you for showing me this."

Why This Matters Now

We live in a moment when young people are being asked to perform identity (often publicly, often on platforms designed to flatten them) before they have had the chance to construct it. Anxiety and depression among adolescents and young adults remain elevated. The traditional toolkits including including verbal therapy, cognitive worksheets, and journaling, are valuable, but they are not enough for everyone.

LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® offers something rare: a way to do serious developmental work that does not feel like work. It honours the truth that thinking is not only what happens in the head. Thinking happens through the hands, through metaphor, through making.

In line with Albert Einstein's insight that play is the highest form of research, LSP reminds us that the most profound questions a human being can ask are sometimes best answered by picking up a brick.

-

GRAAM Academy offers training programmes in Positive Psychology and AI-powered tools for schools and organisations, including identity-formation workshops grounded in narrative psychology and creative exploration methods. Learn more at graamacademy.org.

References

• Bauer, J. J., McAdams, D. P., & Pals, J. L. (2008). Narrative identity and eudaimonic well-being. Journal of Happiness Studies, 9, 81–104.
• Gauntlett, D. (2007). Creative explorations: New approaches to identities and audiences. Routledge.
• Hauser, S. T., Allen, J. P., & Golden, E. (2006). Out of the woods: Tales of resilient teens. Harvard University Press.
• Kristiansen, R., & Rasmussen, R. (2014). Building a better business using the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® method. Wiley.
• McAdams, D. P., & McLean, K. C. (2013). Narrative identity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3), 233–238.
• Singer, J. A. (2004). Narrative identity and meaning making across the adult lifespan. Journal of Personality, 72(3), 437–460.
• The LEGO® Group. (2010). Open-source: Introduction to LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®. Billund, Denmark.
• Tseng, W. C. (2017). An intervention using LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® on fostering narrative identity among economically disadvantaged college students in Taiwan. Journal of College Student Development, 58(2), 264–282.