|| WORD || If there are two courses of action, you should always take the third. ~ Chinese Proverb
And just to dial it way up, here’s NINE ways to respond, SPARK, stay, and grow with it. NINE stand up approaches that’ll help you bring it, mightily.
- ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT is for those obsessed with the fast track to happiness and success. a. Slow the f’ down. b. Plant your feet firmly on the ground. c. Identify 100 things you love about your life. Seriously, let your concerns soften.
- HUMOR is good medicine – it twists the way we see things and surprises our internal logic. Yes, tickle the funny bone and tease the brain into wacky ways of making sense (insert joke) the funny ha-ha kind.
- PUSH comes from the earlier Latin pulsare, which means to strike out. There’s heat behind pushing, which is pleasing, and unrest, which creates urgency and helps us to give it our all. Yet pushing is hard work and sometimes off-putting. And like most muscle-based strategies, it has a limited capacity. So when push comes to shove – it’s best used in incremental bursts.
- The other side of pushing is QUESTIONING, which is a cultivated practice closely linked to curiosity, that comes from the word (quaerere), to seek, and has the same root as the word quest. Questing makes us feel actively alive.
- Different then a couch potato collapse, RELAXING is a pure and centered way of knowing; so this is where I’m supposed to be.
- SUPERSIZE. Instead of doing 20% more, which ends up being hard and invites us to stay the same. Seek out dreams that are twenty times what you want, and then do twenty times what it will take to carry out those dreams. MASSIVE thoughts work best when followed by MASSIVE action.
- You know the drill. VARIETY is the spice of life. If it becomes dull and boring, shake it up, re-make the assignment, and find another, radically different way to keep things fresh.
- WINGING – IT is improvisational in nature. It taps into our strengths and vulnerabilities, and can unlock a creative state of mind. But winging-it is highly unpredictable and may gobble up precious bandwidth. So reserve this strategy for short personal experiments – and not on other people’s time.
- XIMENES is a Spanish name that means the listener. When we listen, we recycle other people’s power.